film | Mother goosed

First things first: HOODWINKED, a rowdy computer-generated assault on fairy-tale familiarity, is not from the people who made Shrek, though, with both movies sharing a similarly snarky rewrite of childhood fables, you'd be forgiven for thinking otherwise. It's actually the debut effort from a new animation studio called Kanbar, and if their plasticized digital imagery has an intermittent Kewpie-Doll stiffness and lacks the fully-realized textural polish of their Pixar counterparts, well, you kinda forgive them, because: A) it's serviceable and decent enough to work while slightly lowering the bar; and B) raising the bar, at this point, would hinge on besting the technically superlative but unsettlingly hyperrealistic imagery of The Polar Express, which probably means you just nix the cartoon approach entirely and film a damn movie on legitimate sets with live actors, for god's sake. but I digress.

So yeah. In kind of a purée of the screen classic Rashomon, Gregory Maguire's Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister and a rucksack of speed, Hoodwinked (adorable title, by the way) purports that there's more to the altercation between Little Red Riding Hood (pertly voiced by The Princess Diaries' Anne Hathaway) and the big bad wolf (Seinfeld's Patrick Warburton, drolly amusing as usual) — who, in a botched attempt at procuring dinner, impersonated her dear old grandma (Glenn Close) — than you ever heard in kindergarten. For starters, the wolf's really an ace reporter hot on the trail of a dessert thief known as "the goody bandit," and granny, secretly an extreme-sports junkie, can handle trouble herself. Further sly surprises and clever overlaps occur as each of the characters involved in the imbroglio gives a statement to an amphibious police inspector (David Ogden Stiers) whose British accent and stalwart sleuthing suggest a Wind in the Willows excerpt penned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

It's all quite cute — and, in moments, even inspired — but a feeling of restlessness eventually emerges from stretching a story that takes the length of a commercial break to tell into an 81-minute parade of in-jokes and sight gags, and a handful of half-assed musical numbers are extra padding on a movie that essentially is extra padding. But then, just as Hoodwinked begins to seriously burn off the last ounces in its reserve tank of viewer goodwill, a brilliant vocal performance by Newsradio's Andy Dick as a nefarious forrest critter enlivens a finale that's more manic fun than it has any right to be. Suddenly, Fleeced — the true account of Mary and her little lamb versus the Massachusetts Board of Education — doesn't seem like such a bad idea. B-