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" Dr.
Seuss' Horton Hears a Who " |
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Posted on
1:00 p.m. PST March 21, 2008 |
By Ty Burr, Globe Staff
03/14/2008
I'm probably being overly kind rating "Dr. Seuss' Horton
Hears a Who!" as more than strictly average
computer-animated kiddie fare, but two things swayed me.
First, it's a relief not to have to put
up with Mike Myers as a cretin in a cat suit. Second, after
the Saturday morning screening I attended, every 4-year-old
stood and applauded. With a movie like this, they're the
critics, not me.
If you have a kid or have ever been one, you know the story.
Horton (the voice of Jim Carrey) is a big gormless elephant
lumbering happily through the jungle until the day he hears
a voice coming from a dust-speck. On that speck is the
entire village of Whoville, and in that village is the Mayor
of Whoville (Steve Carell).
This is the kind of perspective-altering insight familiar to
decades of dorm-room stoners, and "Hor ton" lays it out
straight: "Your whole world fits on a flower in my world -
we're in the middle of some amazing cosmic convergence!"
Whoa.
Unfortunately, the rest of the jungle thinks Horton's
hallucinating. Led by a fascist soccer-mom kangaroo (Carol
Burnett) and the Wickersham Brothers - a tribe of rampaging
blue simians who stand as Dr. Seuss's most inspired vision
of mob-think - the animals come after the elephant with a
vengeance, bent on immolating the speck in a vat of boiling
Beezlenut oil. Apply the political witch-hunt parallels as
you see fit.
"Horton Hears a Who!" represents a fresh, and mostly
refreshing, approach in Hollywood's pillaging of the good
doctor's oeuvre. Gone are the A-list stars in eye-sore
make-up of Universal's live-action "How the Grinch Stole
Christmas" (2000) and "The Cat in the Hat" (2003). Gone,
too, is the witless vulgarity of a PG-rated Seuss flick
desperate to pander to middle schoolers and teenagers.
Apparently as appalled by those films as the rest of us,
Audrey Geisel (the author's widow) and her lawyers have
handed over the new film to Fox Animation head Christopher
Meledandri, who understands that a Seuss movie doesn't have
to be hip to work. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Working with Blue Sky Animation ("Ice Age"), Meledandri and
directors Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino have cooked up a
visually luscious CGI jungle for their mop-topped critters
to galumph around in. The trees have three-dimensional depth
but they're recognizably Seussian in surrealist geometry;
the animals mimic the author's sense of line and whimsy,
with a dash of oddball hyper-cuteness derived from Japanese
anime.
Even Whoville feels right: all loopy buildings and
impossible kiddie-Escher staircases. There's a sequence
involving a visit to the Whoville Observatory that's
breathtakingly graceful - a fusion of Rube Goldberg, Wile E.
Coyote, and Alexander Calder.
At the same time, "Horton" strains to fit in with all the
other family "product" cluttering our multiplexes, DVD
players, and landfills. The Whoville sequences have been
turned into wham-bam slapstick, the vulture (Will Arnett) is
now a scary villain with a Russian accent, and the less said
the better about the Mayor's "sassy" black secretary (Niecy
Nash; Wanda Sykes must have been busy doing Applebee's ads).
As if "I meant what I said and I said what I meant, an
elephant's faithful, one hundred percent" (borrowed from
"Horton Hatches the Egg") isn't enough, an extra feel-good
message has been tacked on in the form of the Mayor's
misunderstood son, Jo-jo, who's mostly silent, a la Paul
Dano in "Little Miss Sunshine," but who eventually - well,
let's just say he's voiced by teen singing heartthrob Jesse
McCartney for a reason. Score one for the soundtrack CD.
Carrey can't always keep the smarmy pop-culture
cross-references in check ("I love the smell of bananas in
the morning," oy), and these deliver the expected easy
laughs while betraying the essential simplicity of Dr.
Seuss. Yet the overall tone is playful rather than forced,
and even when "Horton" takes a side-alley into an anime
action parody, I found myself laughing against my better
judgment.
It's a tough balancing act and probably a futile one. As
greedily as Hollywood looks upon these books as a franchise
to strip-mine, the hard fact remains that what's good about
them - Ted Geisel's untrendy gentleness, humor, and
intelligence - resists translation to the big screen.
Which won't stop the studios from trying, obviously. At
least "Horton Hears a Who!" understands that this story's
moral - "A person's a person, no matter how small" - applies
to the customers in the booster seats..
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