Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
Available On Air Stations
Watch Live

Arts & Culture

Horton Hears a Who!

Dr. Seuss has found considerable success on the small screen with the Chuck Jones' animated 1966 cartoon

How the Grinch Stole Christmas (with the inimitable Boris Karloff narrating) being one of the best animated works of all time. Jones adapted it with simple faithfulness to the source material's scope and gentle humor. It was a sharp contrast to the soulless, live action, "bigger must be better" recent live action features that attempted to pump up Dr. Seuss' whimsical tales to blockbuster weight class. Big mistake.

But this year's Horton Hears a Who! brings the scale back down -- a bit -- as it spins a CGI- animated tale of an elephant named Horton (voiced by Jim Carrey) who finds a speck of dusk on a flower, and discovers that the speck contains a microscopic world filled with tiny little Whos. Horton assumes the responsibility and task of finding a safe place for the speck, and his newly acquired friends, including the worrywort mayor (Steve Carrell). But when Kangaroo (voiced with smug authority by Carol Burnett) sees him talking to the speck of dust, she's convinced he's crazy. In addition, Kangaroo, the self-designated local leader, also sees Horton's insistence about life on the speck as a threat to the status quo and her authority. So she orders the other jungle animals to capture and cage Horton, and destroy the speck. But Horton's not about to let that happen because after all, "a person's a person, no matter how small."

Advertisement

Face-off: Kangaroo (Carol Burnett) and Horton (Jim Carrey. (20th Centiry Fox/Dr. Seuss Enterprises)

Chris Wedge may only serve as executive producer but with the film made under the auspices of his Blue Sky Studios production company, it appears that his presence has steered this adaptation in a better direction than the recent live action attempts. You will find more potty humor and slapstick visual gags - the mainstay of Wedge's Ice Age - than was in Dr. Seuss' original material but at least there's an emphasis on humor and irreverence. Directed by Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino (I don't know why animated films always seem to require a pair of directors), the film is best at the tangents it takes as when the jungle war involves guerillas... um I mean gorillas and banana weaponry. Or when an adorably cute creature imagines a world where ponies eat rainbows and poop out butterflies. Is that taking a dump on My Little Pony and every icky-sweet cartoon out there or what? There's also an old school style animated sequence that harkens back to the highly successful Seuss TV cartoons, and even a manga-anime inspired section in which the characters battle Pokemon style. (But the fact that the film uses the now pass e Pokemon as its anime model is a bit odd.) There's also an attempt to modernize Dr. Seuss with Seth Rogen voicing a wisecracking Morton.

The film feels tailored to the particular talents of Jim Carrey and Steve Carrell. It lets them improvise (or at least appear to improvise) beyond Dr. Seuss' delightful original rhymes. The extended length of a feature film once again prompts the Dr. Seuss adapters (this time Ken Dario and Cinco Paul) to pad out the original story. Crossing a bridge becomes a big set piece and a mob scene gets a bit out of control. But at least this time the padding feels better suited to the story. But while Dr. Seuss often let his fables play out with a light touch, this Horton insists on hitting home the message points about the way authority figures fear kids using their imaginations and how the point of all this is to think and question authority. Telling us the message doesn't make it stronger, it just makes it more obvious. Plus by making Kangaroo, with her "pouch-schooled" offspring, seem like a religious right creationist politicizes the story in a way Dr. Seuss always wisely avoided. It also dates the story rather than keeping the issues timeless. Dr. Seuss' genius was in the sly, funny and deceptively simple way he could make kids - and even adults - think outside the box.


Steve Carell voices the Mayor of Whoville. (20th Century Fox/Dr. Seuss Enterprises)

Advertisement

The CGI animation is appealing for the most part. But I have to admit that the short old school 2D animation did make me nostalgic for the olf TV cartoons that captured more of Dr. Seuss' particular style. But the characters have a Seussical nature, and we even get a Goth Seuss character in little JoJo, the mayor's introverted only son. The animators also have fun depicting both Horton's and the Whos' worlds. But I'm not convinced that the 3D CGI style is the one best suited to bringing Dr. Seuss to life. There's soemthing about the more hand-drawn style that sems more apt. I wonder how Japan's exquisitely skilled and ever-enchanting Hayao Miyazaki might animate Dr. Seuss.

Horton Hears a Who! (rated G) feels like a dumbed down, less sly and not as sweetly enchanting version of Dr. Seuss' original fable. Yet even with those drawbacks it is far better than any of the other recent adaptations of Dr. Seuss. Plus, it at least finds its own brand of pleasing comedy. Horton moves Hollywood in the right direction even if it hasn't found the big screen equivalent of Dr. Seuss' unique literary style. And unlike The Grinch and The Cat in the Hat, this film won't make Dr. Seuss turn in his grave.

Companion viewing: How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966 TV cartoon), Horton Hears a Who! (1970 TV cartoon now on DVD), Ice Age, The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T