Check out the Hoodwinked Too!: Hood vs. Evil trailer at AWNtv!

Has it really been five years since Hoodwinked was released? Well, we were promised a sequel, and even though it's been sitting on a shelf for a year, today The Weinstein Co. finally offers Hoodwinked Too!: Hood vs. Evil in 3-D (marking the feature directorial debut of Mike Disa). Red is voiced by Hayden Panettiere instead of Anne Hathaway, and Jim Belushi is also MIA, but Granny (Glenn Close), Wolf (Patrick Warburton), Twitchy (Cory Edwards) and the rest of the gang is back, and joined by a cast of new characters, including Hansel and Gretel (Bill Hader and Amy Poehler) and Verushka the Witch (Joan Cusack). The animation was done by Arc Prods. (formerly Starz Animation Toronto) and we spoke with Matthew Teevan, head of production, and Paul Kohout, animation supervisor, about the experience.

Bill Desowitz: When did you work on Hoodwinked Too!?

Matthew Teevan: We finished more than two years ago. We worked for 15 months from beginning to end, with about 22 or 23 animators. Kanbar fed the story reel to us and we started with act one. They were still doing story while we were still building assets and starting animation.

BD: So you were finishing 9 and just starting Gnomeo & Juliet?

 MT: Yes, this overlapped with those shows.

BD: What do you recall about the experience?

MT: We have a pretty solid infrastructure here, and we managed everything pretty discreetly. There was the Hoodwinked crew and the crews for the other shows. We didn't make any pipeline changes for the show itself. Again, part of the reason we were able to do the show is that we've put together a number of TV and features through. We had animators we knew could do it and we could light the stuff. It was more just leveraging all the stuff that already existed. The big city scenes and forest scene had to be figured out how to be rendered. How do you make it look like 5,000 trees without building them all. Things like that had to be figured out just to make it feasible. I think some of the biggest accomplishments aren't necessarily the showiest.

Paul Kohout: Physically that city scene had to be pared back. We were working on a system where we had city blocks built and we'd bring in which blocks we needed with as little geometry as we could get away with. I think originally it had been modeled as one set, which was virtually unusable and unrenderable, so we spent a lot of time mapping that city out and breaking it apart. I think we were down to individual storefronts at one point so we could dress the city streets differently when they needed to be. A LEGO system, basically, would be one way to describe it.