Little Red Riding Hood
1969 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Rhoda Leyer
Genres: animation, family, fantasy
A young girl, her grandmother and a scheming wolf appear in an animated retelling of the classic Little Red Riding Hood tale.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1969 animator taking the safest fairy tale in the Western canon and doing... exactly what you'd expect—whimsy, tenderness, the whole greeting-card package. There's nothing here that makes me say 'wait, WHAT?' just 'wait, why?'
Leyer's restraint in the animation grammar—the decision to let sentiment breathe through formal simplicity rather than baroque detail—situates this squarely in the NFB's mid-century humanist tradition, a lineage of fairy tale adaptation that prizes emotional clarity over spectacle.
The vocal performance from the grandmother carries the whole thing; that single thread of weariness and love in her delivery transforms what could be rote into something genuinely lived, even in five minutes of cel animation.