The idea isn’t the worst Netflix ever had.

Crank out an “Into the Woods” and “Wicked” riff on fairytales teaming up Red Riding Hood and Cinderella and give it a mystery for them to solve. Call it “Once Upon a Crime.”

But this tedious, tin-eared Japanese take on The Brothers Grimm finds almost nothing funny in that, just a lot of cute Japanese actresses and actors flippantly making light of Western fairytale tropes and characters, only not light enough.

At least that handsome prince “really knows how to pull of a red jacket and white pants!”

Red Riding Hood (Kanna Hashimoto) is minding her own business on her overdressed way to Spenhagen when a witch (Midoriko Kimura) cackles and taunts her over her shoes and won’t let her pass until she’s “fixed” that.

“In this country, beauty is the only thing that matters,” she hoots (in Japanese with subtitles, or dubbed). But she’s not very good at conjuring up the whole footwear makeover thing.

Red barely has time to get used to whatever’s happened to her comfy boots when she runs into Cinderella (Yûko Araki) who has problems far beyond footwear. She’s being bullied. Red Riding’s first clue?

“Your name literally means ‘covered in ashes.'”

A second witch is summoned –“What’s with all the witches today?” And the footwear matter is cleared up thanks to some glass slippers. Turn a pumpkin and mice into a coach and four, with coachman, and they’re all set for the ball, makeovers complete.

Running over the king’s favorite hairdresser on the way doesn’t cast as much of a pall over the evening as you might think. Until, as the heroines get a gander of the handsome prince (Takanori Iwata), dance with him and compete with Cinderella’s evil stepsisters for his attention, word gets out that the hairdresser is dead.

Who did it? Who hid the body? And why? Nobody is LEAVING This castle until…

Director Yûichi Fukuda (“Black Night Parade” and “Psychic Kusuo” were his) found out the hard way that the surest means of snuffing the light out in a comical fairytale is to burden the middle acts with witnesses, accusations, a dry mid-ball interrogation to figure out “Who killed that hairdresser, and why?”

While the production design is sparkling and the costumes impressive, there’s little here that might have given this corpse signs of life. The jokes in the dialogue are flat, the sight gags almost non-existent and the murder mystery barely worth labeling that.

It’s impossible to make some point about shallow “beauty” being the arbiter of citizenship and a means of getting one into the palace of Claire de Lune when literally everybody in the cast is inutterably gorgeous.

When every character is Milan or Paris runway ready, who gets to call whom “ugly” anyway? Even a six year-old could see through that, and as they’re the target audience here, well…

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Kanna Hashimoto, Yûko Araki, Takanori Iwata, Natsuna, Miki Maya and Midoriko Kimura

Credits: Directed by Yûichi Fukuda, scripted by Aito Aoyagi. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47