The angle that animation filmmakers Cory Edwards and Todd Edwards take in "Hoodwinked" -- their unnecessary variant of the "Little Red Riding Hood" story -- seems to have more to do with marketing than storytelling: It's to reinvest the Grimm Brothers story of the little girl stalked by the wolf who has disguised himself as her grandma in the idiom of the ancient television series "Dragnet."

Anyone familiar with that early-TV classic will recognize the tropes: the solemn narrative arranged in strict chronology as keyed to a time signifier ("3:42 P.M."), the deadpan tone of the narrator, the use of police code ("a 3-42 in progress") as the story is broken down and reassembled in the form of an investigation. Except this one is dumb-de-dumb-dumb, and if you get that, you're as ancient as the far hills.

Who will be familiar with these stylizations? The answer: grandparents. So when we take our grandkids to the flickers, we'll connect, and the grandkids, being somewhat undiscriminating, will like the funny animated creatures, the bright colors, even if the "Dragnet" stuff flies over their heads. So as marketing theory, "Hoodwinked" makes a little sense. Too bad, then, it's so crummy.

As animation, it's far from state of the art; the creatures seem more like rubber toys than animated beings, and their faces are without nuance or vividness. It's hard to become emotionally involved in the fate of rubber objects. Then there's the vocal cast. It's a combination of has-beens and almost-weres. Glenn Close: Over. Anne Hathaway: Never happened. James Belushi: Over. Patrick Warburton: Patrick who? He was Puddy, Elaine's self-absorbed boyfriend on "Seinfeld." Never was and Over, simultaneously. David Ogden Stiers! Good lord, David Ogden Stiers! Really.

-- Stephen Hunter