A Pony for Your Thoughts

By ROB DEWALT

Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who!, animated children’s-book adaptation, rated G, Regal Stadium 14, 424-6296, 3 chiles

Relentless publicity leading up to the March 14 release of the latest Dr. Seuss movie made it perfectly clear that this would not be a cutesy tribute to the original source material. Instead, fans of Theodor S. Geisel’s children’s book Horton Hears a Who! were forewarned by movie trailers and ads that Hollywood’s obsession with referencing contemporary pop-culture in animated movies would continue in this film. If you can accept this as the current industry norm, you’ll find Horton an 88-minute joyride with an abundance of laughs and thrills. However, if you’re a Seuss purist who still fumes at the live-action blasphemies that are Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas! and Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat, prepare to feel miffed all over again.

Despite a heft of unfunny allusions to real-world history and celebrity, a screenplay by Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul manages

to relay Geisel’s modest observation that “a person’s a person, no matter how small.” Horton (Jim Carrey), a gentle elephant in a jungle called Nool, stumbles upon a speck of dust inhabited by a city of beings called Whos. He begins communicating with Whoville’s tiny mayor (Steve Carell) and tries to convince his fellow Noolians that an entire civilization exists on a nearly microscopic orb and needs to be protected.

Nool is riddled with naysayers, the most vocal of whom is Kangaroo (Carol Burnett), a self-righteous realist who finds Horton’s odd claim a threat to the jungle’s young and impressionable minds. Never one to get her own paws dirty, Kangaroo hires a scraggly, inept buzzard named Vlad (Will Arnett) to dispense with the speck so order can be restored in Nool. It’s a race against time as Horton tries to rescue Whoville before it is destroyed by the close-minded mobs Kangaroo has inflamed.

In the end, it will be up to the Whos to save themselves.

Meanwhile, Whoville’s mayor is having similar difficulties convincing his townspeople that a giant elephant holds their fate in the curl of his trunk. Already juggling a wife, 97 children (one son, 96 daughters), and a career in public office, the mayor is reluctant to accept that a pachyderm he can’t see is pulling the strings. Only after it starts snowing in summer do the Whos begin questioning their autonomy. It’s not too late to save Whoville, but the entire town must band together and make its presence known to the doubting Nools or the Whos will be boiled alive in a cauldron of sticky oil.

Directors Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino render a dreamy, awe- inspiring world with the help of Blue Sky Studios (the same folks who brought you the Ice Age franchise). Nool is presented in candy colored, panoramic beauty, and Seuss’ original cartoon is honored respectably, albeit with updated, three-dimensional animation. Whoville is a frantic, texturally complex playground reminiscent of Martino’s work on 2005′s Robots (another Blue Sky endeavor). On this point, I must geek out to say that ray-tracing technology — a computer-graphics application that allows filmmakers to add minute details to three-dimensional animated scenes by mimicking the real- life effects of directional light — is used to its fullest here. Horton’s stretchy, calloused skin and the furry attributes of the genus Who are vivid and uncannily lifelike. It’s the one marvel that gives adults something to ponder besides the price of a tub of popcorn and a collection of mature inside jokes that aren’t worth remembering anyway.

A poorly executed midstory tribute to Japanimation is a distraction better suited for the “bonus features” section of the film’s inevitable holiday-release on DVD. The simple plot is already stretched to its limits by extraneous dialogue penned by the folks who brought you College Road Trip and Bubble Boy. Going Pokemon on an audience when some of the world’s most formidable computer- generated-

animation geniuses are at your disposal is a decision the filmmakers should have reconsidered.

Celebrity voice talent may be a ploy to draw big box-office numbers, but the actors here deliver enough laughs and personal quirks to make the red-carpet rollout worthwhile. The character who offers the film’s most important plot contribution has very little to say in the script, but he is rendered in voice and vision with an honesty that deserves mentioning. The Whoville mayor’s lone son, JoJo (Jesse McCartney), is a brooding, “emo”-type boy searching for his own identity among his fellow Whos. His quiet actions speak loudest to Geisel’s pronouncement that “a person’s a person, no matter how small.”

The potential for exploring philosophical and political subtexts here is boundless: the individual defying mob rule, blind faith driving collective decision-making at the cost of common sense, and why, among 97 kids, is the lone male the only one capable of making things right? Don’t get me started on the guy sitting behind me who, after downing a Coke the size of a small Jacuzzi, proclaimed loudly during the credits that Horton was a George W. Bush/Republican archetype and that Whoville represented occupied Iraq suffering under the thumb of a domineering foreign superpower.

C’mon. Must we? This is a movie for children. Let an elephant be an elephant, and let a child’s imagination take charge. To quote a character from the film, “In my world, everyone’s a pony, and they all eat rainbows and poop butterflies.” Our world should be so lucky, even for a scant 88 minutes.

(c) 2008 The Santa Fe New Mexican. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.