I like adaptations. I like it when you take a story everybody knows and pivot a little … or a lot. Like today, where the producers have taken two traditionally European folk tales, mashed them together, set them in Japan, and added a murder mystery for good measure.
None of that bothers me.
What bothers me about the Little Red Riding Hood/Cinderella/homicide mashup is the fact the film’s lows were much lower than the film’s highs. There’s only so much bad acting a brain can stand … even overdubbed in another language. The cheese is strong in this one.
Little Red Riding Hood (Kanna Hashimoto) is doing her woods thang when she happens upon the first of two witches. Unable to shake the sorceress, Hood condescends to a shoe upgrade, which horribly backfires and leads to her meeting with Cinderella (Yûko Araki). These two “accidental” meetings and an addition of second witch [read: “fairy Godmother”] seemed highly contrived and poorly acted, which makes the viewer want to abandon the movie within the first ten minutes.
However, Red -not unlike the Red Riding Hood of Hoodwinked– turns out to be especially astute, effectively reading Cinderella’s status as step-daughter, waif, and underappreciated from her countenance and appearance. This insight comes in handy when the leads happen upon a dead body in the road on the way to the big dance.
In fact, it is not long before the king is citing “Detective Red Riding Hood” as the lead investigator
into the case of the murdered hairdresser. And the killer is likely someone at the ball!
So that’s fun, right? We’ve taken a fairly stale tale (ok, so I’m not a 13-year-old girl, but aren’t we all a little unmoved by Cinderella at this point?) and introduced a murder, which is fun. There’s also the part where the prince has an ex- OH! You mean he isn’t necessarily gonna go gaga over the mystery woman with the glass slipper? Tell me more! And the king is willing to lock up his own son when it appears the prince is guilty of murder? Well that just is not even a POV I had considered.
This would all be wonderful were the film not a piece of cheese large enough for a mutant hybrid mega-rat. I love that writer/director Yûichi Fukuda tried something new … tried spinning a new angle on a celebrated narrative. I’m just left a little empty by the overacting and the vacuous characters. If you’re going to go that route, this film works better as an animated tale, which clearly didn’t happen here. I would love to see if Fukuda ever hits my radar again, but I see that this is his career – taking a cheesy classic tale and making it cheesier. I suppose I’ll see some weird Japanese interpretation of Pinocchio, Willy Wonka, or JFK at some point, but I won’t search for it.
Little Red was Riding the back wood
Assuming her whole world was good
But along came Cinderella
And a real dead fella
Maybe next time, Red, stay in the ‘Hood
Rated TV-14, 107 Minutes
Director: Yûichi Fukuda
Writer: Aito Aoyagi, Yûichi Fukuda, Tetsurô Kamata
Genre: Fractured fairy tale
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: People who like to revisit the classics
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: People who need the classics to stay exactly as they are
