With Horton Hears a Who!, the inventive gang at Blue Sky Studios have concocted an ebullient full-length feature from Dr. Seuss' slender comic verse narrative about an elephant whose big ears detect a whole world on a dust-speck.
Unlike live-action filmmakers Ron Howard with How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Bo Welch with The Cat in the Hat, the Blue Sky team (including directors Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino and writers Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul) stays true to the spirit and characters of the book while embellishing it to overflowing.
If you haven't picked up the book since grade school (it first appeared in 1954), watching the movie brings you the rare feeling of reconnecting with a childhood friend who looks and acts different but in some essential way has stayed the same.
In fact, Horton is a near-perfect buddy - Dr. Seuss (or Theodor Geisel, his real name) had the genius to extend the idea of an elephant never forgetting to an elephant never forgetting a pal. In a line the writers borrow from another jolly Seuss masterwork, Horton Hatches the Egg, Horton (Jim Carrey) tells his new compadre, the Mayor of Whoville (Steve Carell), "An elephant's faithful, one hundred percent."
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The movie is about Horton sticking to that motto, that creed, even when every other grown creature in the Jungle of Nool thinks he's off his gourd - and everyone in Whoville thinks the Mayor is nuts, too.
The movie is a survival tale with divine pratfalls instead of disasters. Horton tests the limits of endurance and flexibility, as well as the length of his trunk, trying to protect his speck from villains who think his belief in it undercuts the status quo. And the mayor must convince his constituents that Whoville has an unseen ally named Horton as the other Noolians strive to rock his world.
For kids, the movie has multiple fascinations. The Whos are like imaginary friends who turn out to be real: "We're a club, we're a group," exults Horton; "We can be a secret society and no one else can join, unless they wear funny hats." Their existence on a mote-sized world opens up the idea of an innerspace as vast as outer space. And the youthful denizens of the Jungle of Nool experience Horton's Whoville as an explosion of creativity and new possibilities.
