Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who!

G	Rottentomatoes.com Rating:78%	2008
(Brief, mild sight gags, peril)	Picky Flicks Quote: "A bit too much on the frenetic side, the movie is nonetheless colorful and diverting." -Rob Gonsalves, efilmcritic.com	RUNTIME:1 hr. 30 min.
Visit:www.screenit.com for complete details		Movie Mood: Silly

Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who! is a charming movie. It’d be a lot more charming if it didn’t try so hard to be hip and just let its charm flow freely, though. That’s not to say that its forced hipness detracts greatly from the viewing experience because it doesn’t. But the lack of it might just have transformed an immensely amusing movie into a timeless classic.

Of course, with Jim Carrey as Horton the elephant, Steve Carrell as the mayor of Whoville, and Seth Rogen as Morton (Horton’s tiny blue, mouse-ish friend), I’m not so sure the makers of the movie were shooting for timeless classic so much as smart-mouthed-while-still-clean kiddie winner. And they ably achieve the latter, so let’s just call it a success, shall we? (Although, I will say that, when given the option between watching Horton for a second time or Cinderella for the forty thousandth, my 2 ½ year old, Ezra, immediately opted for good ol’ “Cindwehwuh”—he can’t say his “r’s” or his “l’s yet; it’s really very cute).

Horton is the story of a daffy, overweight (although he has slimmed down, he proudly notes) elephant who lives in the jungle of Nool and enjoys providing pro bono nature ed classes to the neighborhood kiddos. Never mind that he’s usually wrong about the information he’s providing, he’s just so darn lovable that just about everybody overlooks his rather glaring lack of sense and adores him anyway. Everybody except for Jane, the sour kangaroo, that is, and she has appointed herself as Nool’s guardian of protocol and decorum. Horton is just a little too silly and sloppy for her tastes.

Of course, doing the mellow mammoth no favors is his claim that he hears a scream coming from a tiny speck that lands on a clover. He’s convinced that he’s discovered another world—an entire universe confined inside an infinitesimal spot—full of people and places and things just like in Nool. Well, maybe not just like Nool but close enough, right? Wrong, according to the sour kangaroo, who, when she hears of Horton’s whacky claims, makes it her personal mission to rid Nool of both Horton’s far-fetched stories and the speck that is perpetuating them.

The thing is, Horton’s right. There is a whole other world inside that speck, which is inhabited by the Whos, who are, naturally, citizens of Whoville. Most notably, the movie introduces us to the mayor, his wife Sally, and their ninety-eight daughters (I think I laughed hardest when the movie does a montage of all of the mayor’s daughters and how he spends a minute or so with each one each day; at one point three of them go whirling by, and Sally says, “That's one of my girls,” with absent-minded pride). Then, there’s his long-suffering solitary male offspring, Jo-Jo, on whom dear old Dad is placing a lot of pressure to become the next mayor of Whoville in keeping with a long-standing tradition of—oh—no more than 10,000 years or so.

As different as Horton and the mayor are, they have one thing in common. For the longest time, they’re the only ones that are aware of the other’s existence, and no one else will believe them. What’re an elephant, and a…strange, Whoish creature to do?

Well, before things can get better, they must get worse, of course, with the sour kangaroo calling out a hit on the clover and Horton being prodded and poked into a cage for being an apparent lunatic. It is only when the Whos band together—including the reticent and heretofore entirely mute Jo-Jo—to raise their voices in protest against their demise that they are able to be saved and everyone in the jungle of Nool finally understands Horton’s mantra: “A person’s a person no matter how small.”

The movie does a good job of mixing both classic Dr. Seuss rhythms with modern day scripting and sequences, though, as I mentioned in the opening paragraph, the film suffers from an overabundance of pop culture references and an overall jokey tone. There’s also one particular made-me-squirm bad sequence of Japanimé that I found entirely unnecessary and not in keeping with the film’s overall style. But the voice acting is universally stellar (that’s high praise coming from a girl who usually gets the willies at Jim Carrey’s vocal tics), with Carol Burnett making a particularly regal impression as the sour kangaroo.

It’s not a flawless movie, by any stretch, but it’s clever and original (even considering its source of inspiration in Seuss’s fanciful story) and a nice change of pace from the high-pitched squeakiness of Cinderella’s mice (don’t get me wrong, I love them and her, but it’s always nice to mix things up a little).

Until next Wednesday, stay picky. Your mind will thank you later!