Let’s get the embarrassing admission out of the way up front: I don’t really have any knowledge of the Dr. Seuss ouvre. I’m sure I read them all when I was a kid but since I don’t really remember anything before the 5th grade, it has all been lost to me. So all I have are images: A cat in a hat but I don’t remember what he was up to. Something about red fish and blue fish. Two things staring at each other while a modern superhighway was constructed around them.
And an elephant looking closely at a flower. Beyond that I had no memory of the actual story in Horton Hears a Who! and so creating a feature-length movie really seemed like a stretch. So after a short stop at Borders, I was fully up to speed—and there really is a story. A story that’s probably about as short as this review will be, but a story nonetheless.
For those who suffer childhood amnesia as I do, Horton is an elephant in a jungle. His big ears allow him to hear a tiny cry for help from a dust speck flying by. He decides there must be tiny people living on this speck, and dedicates himself to saving them from harm. Since none of the other denizens of the jungle have ears as good as Horton’s, they don’t believe him—and to prove their point, attempt to destroy the speck (which has come to rest on a clover) while the Whos living on the speck in Whoville work with Horton to try to prove their existence.
Obviously, there’s going to have to be some filler to extend that out to 90 minutes and that primarily takes two forms. First, Horton (Jim Carrey) is something of a doofus and therefore takes much longer to do things than they might otherwise. For example, his trek to move the speck-bearing clover to a safe location pauses for an anime-inspired kung fu fight. More significantly, the world of Whoville has been expanded greatly as we learn the details of city managment. The Mayor of Whovile (Steve Carell), is from a centuries-long family tree of Whoville mayors, but he is more of a figurehead. Since nothing ever goes wrong in Whoville, the city council views him as something of a boob, and so when the danger to the city starts to become evident, nobody particularly believes him.
The script by Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul (who also contributed to last week’s much less successful College Road Trip) ends up being an interesting mish-mash of humor style: a gag of monkeys shooting bananas from their armpits is followed by a Henry Kissinger joke. In fact, the two political references in the movie are Kissinger and John Kennedy. Apparently the target audience is grandparents taking their 6-year-old grandchildren to a movie.
The action keeps moving, though, with amusing asides and enough jokes and sight gags flying by that everybody is sure to find at least a few that hit the mark. Less satisfying, though, is the expansion of the message of the book: That it’s important for the strong to help the weak and that every voice counts, even the smallest. Kangaroo (Carol Burnett) has expanded from being a naysayer to being the oddest of villains: An anti-imagination materialist home schooler. Her mantra is, “If I can’t see it and can’t touch it, then it doesn’t exist.” The importance of being right means going to extreme measures to try and make sure the clover is destroyed.
The potential anti-atheism message will go over most people’s heads (and not strike most others as controversial) so it won’t slow down enjoyment for the kids. Both Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino are rookie directors but they seem to have taken to heart the lessons Hayward must have learned during his years animating at Pixar. Namely that, whatever gags you put in, the story is still supreme. Everything, therefore, keeps things moving towards the conclusion. They also prove that just because you are working in the field of computer animation doesn’t mean you have to go for mindblowing environmental fidelity. The animation looks good but it isn’t trying to create a fully realized world, defined down to the last caterpillar hair.
Just to prove that they could, though, the first shot of a movie has a drop of water falling from a leaf that looked so real that I momentarily wasn’t sure. Instead, they decided to pay proper respect to the art of Dr. Seuss without exactly mimicking it.
The verbal antics of Jim Carrey also come off well in playing a good-hearted oaf, subtracting his physical elasticity from the scenes reduces him but leaves behind enough quirkiness to give things an edge (several times, in my mind, I was imagining what he must have looked like while reading at the recording studio). Steve Carell may be a bit of a dud in that much of what makes him so funny is the flatness of his voice—and so without the body, he is rather nondescript. But fortunately while his part as Mayor is much bigger than in the book, the weight of the movie still rests squarely on Horton’s large back.
It is hard to imagine Horton Hears a Who! becoming a timeless classic like the old Grinch cartoon, but it is good harmless fun. It is too preachy by the end but kids won’t care, and at the screening I attended even the youngest kids in the audience held attention for the full 90 minutes. Adults will likely find it a little sparse with too much preaching at the end, but there is more than enough there to keep it fun.
Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who! is a 20th Century Fox/Blue Sky Pictures production
- Wide release on March 14
- Directed by Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino
- Screenplay by Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul
- Starring: Jim Carrey, Steve Carrel, Carol Burnett, Will Arnett, Seth Rogan
- Rated G
- Alex’s Rating: 7 out of 10
