'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, multilayered family entertainment, tailored to an audience fully aware that the word "hood" denotes not only a type of head-covering but also urban territory disputed by gangs.

In this animated retelling, released on Friday, young Red turns out to be 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 nursery version, and the narrative variously sends up the James Bond and Mission: Impossible franchises, the 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.