Hoodwinked! (2005) - ★★★½

Last night, I went to the theater and saw a preview for the latest Illumination film. It looked just like every other Illumination film, which all look just like every DreamWorks film, which of course all look just slightly worse than every Disney/Pixar film. There are a lot of reviews here talking about how bad Hoodwinked! looks, but you know what? It doesn't look like that. Instead, it has a strong flavor of the sorts of videos I was seeing in the Linux community around this time being touted as "made entirely in open-source software". This was apparently made in Maya, but the realities of its creation by a small team who weren't digital animation experts is visible in every frame, in the same way that the realities of budget and physicality are visible in every frame of a traditionally-animated film. It doesn't look polished in the same way that Madagascar (also 2005) does, but it does look distinctive. When characters emote here, it doesn't look like the universal set of…

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