With Hoodwinked, a new animated version of the old tale, now on release, Mark Lawson reflects on the many incarnations of Little Red Riding Hood
'You probably think you know the story," says the sardonic voiceover at the start of Hoodwinked, as we see a leather-bound volume of classic fairy tales lying open at the legend of Little Red Riding Hood. The movie then dresses up this old granny of a fable in the vulpine comedy of post-Shrek, multi-layered family entertainment, tailored to an audience aware that "hood" denotes not only a head-covering but also urban territory disputed by gangs.
In this animated retelling, young Red is a tough, sussed type whose first words to the wolf are: "You again? What do I have to do? Get a restraining order?" The film's poster pastiches The Usual Suspects, and this hints at a narrative in which visual and verbal clues consistently mislead. None of the central characters - Red, Granny, the Wolf, the Woodsman - fulfils the same purpose as in the traditional version, and the narrative sends up the James Bond and Mission: Impossible franchises, TV series CSI, and even the genre of computer-generated "kidult" movies itself. After a reversal, the heroine mooches around while a Randy Newman-ish ballad called Red is Blue oozes on the soundtrack.
However, for audiences truly to be surprised by this vision of the girl in the 'hood, they would need to have avoided the numerous modernisations of the Little Red Riding Hood story that have already been attempted in print and on film. The French fabulist, Charles Perrault, was the first to commit the story to ink, publishing it in 1697 as Le Petit Chaperon Rouge. Most of the familiar details are in this initial telling: a young girl's visit to a sick grandmother ends in death as a result of flirting with a wolf (in fact, a werewolf) in the woods. The colour of the head-covering could be taken to symbolise either sin or the blood of female fertility.
Adolescent girls of the time didn't have to wait for Freud to discern the message in the story of the hairy protruberance lying behind unthreatening clothes. "Seeing the wolf" even reportedly entered French slang as a euphemism for losing one's virginity. Perrault directed his allegory at girls wandering off the track and chatting to chaps, although in earlier European oral versions the heroine is more like the Hoodwinked character, who outwits the wolf to survive.
The Grimm brothers, in their 1812 variation, Rotkappchen (Red-Cap), made the girl less culpable and less helpless. In their vision, a woodkeeper - representing a benign masculinity which contrasts with the wolf's - is able to free both granny and granddaughter from the wolf's stomach by performing an emergency gastric operation on the interloper. The women together then see off a second wolf.
Subsequent updatings loosened the central character's moral corsets. The 19th-century French writer, Alphonse Daudet, made his heroine a free spirit in a society trying to force her to walk approved paths. And New Yorker humourist James Thurber's The Girl and the Wolf (1940) ends with Red producing a gun and shooting her aggressor dead. Thurber's moral, that little girls are not so easy to fool nowadays, began the tendency to reverse the original characterisations.
Anne Sexton, in a verse retelling of the story from her 1971 collection of updated fairy tales, Transformations, is sympathetic to the wolf, or at least to methods of pretence. "Many are the deceivers," her poem begins, before picturing, among others, "the suburban matron, proper in the supermarket", shopping before she meets her lover for sex in a parking lot. As an adulterer who would later commit suicide, the poet was reluctant to endorse the original's moral about not taking people at face value. At the end of her poem, Red and Granny, though saved from the wolf's belly, are left "remembering nothing" of their ordeal. They are still deceived.
In a 1974 adaptation by French-American children's writer Tomi Ungerer, the wolf is able to persuade the girl to marry him and this submission is presented as a happy ending. Although Ungerer presumably intended to subvert the virginity propaganda of the Perrault original and suggest that the male stranger doesn't necessarily bite, a truly modern version would now have the young woman enjoying a one-night stand with the imposter before returning to work or college.
In the1970S, a period of unease about the stories told to women to keep them down, Angela Carter played with the Perrault and Grimm versions in three tales about girls and werewolves, culminating in The Company of Wolves, a story filmed in 1984 by Neil Jordan. A movie so Freudian that you keep expecting it to grow a beard and move to Vienna, The Company of Wolves takes place in the erotic dreams and nightmares of a pre-pubescent girl. Her father, seen in the film's contemporary sequences, turns up in other worrying guises in the dark, woodland dream scenes. Carter obeys Perrault's original in making the threatening stranger a werewolf ("Never trust a man whose eyebrows meet," the girl is warned by her granny), but she rejects his moral. Her red-caped female is at first frightened and then excited by her desires, and at the end has learned to, as Freud might have put it, take the wolf inside her.
This sense of the woman's encounter with the wolf being liberating is also found in Stephen Sondheim's 1987 musical, Into the Woods. His Little Red Riding Hood suspects all too well the danger that the wolf may represent, and her dilemma is whether to submit. At the end she decides: "Though scary is exciting/ Nice is different than good."
Recently, though, the meaning of the fairy tale has been inverted again, warning against predatory masculinity, particularly in connection with paedophilia. In Matthew Bright's Freeway (1996), Reese Witherspoon is an abused teenager who runs away from home to seek sanctuary at her nan's but is intercepted by a psychologist (Kiefer Sutherland), whose apparent friendship conceals hidden threats. The climactic scene in The Woodsman (2005) features Kevin Bacon as a paroled sex offender following a girl into the woods. The symbolism is even more explicit in Hard Candy (2006): a teenager wearing a red hoodie is carrying a basket when a photographer persuades her back to his house. Weaving sexual abuse into the tale is logical, given that the monster who threatens Red in the original is disguised as a relative and a home is shown as a dangerous place.
Hoodwinked gives the tale its most dramatic reinterpretation yet, in that the outcome is entirely the result of female actions. This is the surprise that modern Red Riding Hoods tend to keep in their baskets. Whether with serious effect in The Company of Wolves or with comic intention in Hoodwinked, a legend that warned of girlish vulnerability has become a story celebrating female strength.
• Hookwinked is on general release
