Horton Hears a Who! Review

by [email protected] (sdo230 AT gmail DOT com)
March 21st, 2008
Horton Hears a Who
a little review by Sam Osborn

Each Winter, as Christmas draws near, my family blows the dust from our VCR and settles in to Chuck Jones' 1966 TV special "How the Grinch Stole Christmas." The glow of Christmas' past roll out with this twenty-six minute animation, but it's sincerity that opens the floodgates of nostalgia. Sincerity--genuine, heartfelt sincerity--is no longer paramount to animation. Projects like Shrek and Cars, Surfs Up and Robots, they rely on suggestive jokes or complicated pop culture references to entertain their adult audiences. They defect from their own storylines, scared of boring an over-stimulated young adult generation, copping out with easy one-liners. Pixar can still spin the occasional gem of sincerity, harking back to the Disney 2D pictures from that wondrous era. But Cinderella can no longer pine for the Prince and twirl in her glass slippers. The slippers have turned to stilettos, her dress to Prada, and now she's worried about her virginity, conveyed through the overt imagery of cherries.

But Dr. Seuss is the very definition of sincerity. Zany and insane, his works play towards the expansion of the reader's imagination, rocketing so far from reality that pop culture references are as gassy and lame as the swizzled clouds above. Horton Hears a Who understands this principle well enough--which is lucky, since this might have been the third strike for Dr. Seuss adaptations. The Elephants and Whos of Whoville are lovingly rendered, tracing all the whimsical lines and colors laid out in the book. Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul, the screenwriters, have stretched the story reasonably, keeping to appropriate Seussical whimsy. And the cast pulls through admirably, Steve Carell and Seuss veteran, Jim Carrey, flexing their comic muscles for their vocal performances as the Mayor of Whoville and Horton the elephant. But it's all not quite Seuss. Horton breaks it down to a rap beat, one of the Mayor's daughters wants a cell phone. The story is stretched by an anime sequence to elbow out 88 minutes of running length. It's fine and often hilarious, charming in its zany colors, but we still don't buy it as a Seuss creation. It's not as genuine, not as original. Not as insane.
TheMovieMammal.com

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