After 20 years, Hoodwinked! remains one of the strangest experiments in animation ever made, but it’s still hilarious after two decades. The 2000s were a golden age for animation. Some of the best animated movies of the 2000s are also some of the best animated movies of all time, like Shrek, Spirited Away, and The Incredibles. For the most part, however, animation didn’t get extremely weird, and was mostly used for high-quality but straightforward children’s movies. There is one big exception from 2005, however, and it remains one of the strangest animated movies ever made to this day.

With the highs of animation in the 2000s, there also came many more lows. There are plenty of forgotten animated movies from the early 2000s, and many more that were forgotten for good reason. One, however, was too far ahead of its time to be forgotten so quickly, and it’s actually better now than it was two decades ago. That movie is Hoodwinked!, and despite how utterly strange it was, it was also uproariously hilarious with a sense of humor that works much better in 2025.

Hoodwinked! Is A Wild Ride And One Of The Most Fascinating Animated Comedies

Hoodwinked! Mixes Shrek’s Parody Of Fairy Tales With Pulp Fiction’s Non-Linear Storytelling For An Intriguing Final Product

Everything about the premise of Hoodwinked! makes it sound like the animated movie shouldn’t have worked. Hoodwinked! is a reimagining of the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood, but instead of being a simple tale about a wolf trying to eat a little girl, all the characters in the fairy tale work together to uncover a mᴀssive recipe-stealing conspiracy led by a bunny named Boingo (Andy Dick). It also changed Wolf into an investigative journalist, the Woodsman into an aspiring actor and schnitzel seller, Granny into an extreme sports enthusiast, and Red into a martial arts prodigy.

Hoodwinked! parodied several mystery films and shows, but it also drew upon the non-linear storytelling of movies like Pulp Fiction and Rashomon. Each of the characters of Hoodwinked! – who were voiced by mᴀssive stars like Anne Hathaway, Glenn Close, and Patrick Warburton – has their own version of events that contradict one another, and the actual story of the movie isn’t clear until its final moments. Hoodwinked! sounds like a mindless mishmash of completely unconnected ideas and jokes, but it somehow ended up coming together to make a fascinating animated film. There’s truly nothing else that combines so many disparate parts in such a strangely engaging way.

Hoodwinked!’s Animation Is Rough (But The Movie Is Hilarious)

Hoodwinked!’s Animation Was Bad Even In 2005, But It Almost Makes The Movie Funnier

Oddly fascinating though it was, Hoodwinked! was the recipient of quite a bit of criticism. It has just 46% on Rotten Tomatoes, and almost all the critics could agree on one thing: Hoodwinked!‘s animation was terrible. Even by the standards of 2005, when 3D animation was in its infancy, Hoodwinked! looked awful compared to its contemporaries, like Madagascar, Robots, and Chicken Little. There’s a litany of reasons Hoodwinked! looked so bad – the animation team was inexperienced, the creators tried to emulate claymation but ended up making each character look somewhat uncanny, and the entire production ran over budget.

The rough animation of Hoodwinked! hasn’t, however, taken away any of the edge of its humor. There are almost too many hilarious moments in Hoodwinked to list them all. There’s Hoodwinked!‘s parody of Cops, Wolf and Twitchy’s strange partner dynamic, little moments of extraordinarily bizarre and absurd humor, and much more. Japeth the Goat (Benjy Gaither) and his penchant for singing everything he says even became a meme in 2023 (via Know Your Meme). Hoodwinked! is uproariously funny for every second of its 80-minute runtime, and the animation is truly one of the only bad things about the movie.

Hoodwinked Has Aged Weirdly Well 20 Years Later

A Lot Of Hoodwinked’s Humor Was Ahead Of Its Time & Works Tremendously Well In The 2020s

Perhaps the strangest part of Hoodwinked! is how well the film has aged over the past two decades. Hoodwinked! was perhaps a decade behind in terms of animation, but it was well ahead of its time in its sense of humor. The absurdist and slapstick comedy that Hoodwinked! was built on didn’t appeal to critics in 2005, but it works incredibly well in 2025. Some of the film’s jokes, such as Wolf very seriously telling Twitch “God as my witness, you will learn to speak,” would fit in perfectly with the ᴅᴇᴀᴅpan ridiculousness of The Other Guys or Napoleon Dynamite.

Hoodwinked! has defied all expectations and aged like fine wine. What should have been a direct-to-video, schlocky movie found in a department store’s bargain bin turned out to be a true diamond in the rough, and it gets better with each pᴀssing year. Hoodwinked! is truly an anomaly, both for its strange blend of low-grade animation with top-tier humor and for its remarkable staying power. There has never been anything quite like Hoodwinked! before, and there probably won’t be ever again.