Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who!
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Kent Turner -- School Library Journal, 3/12/2008 9:57:00 AM
The new, computer-animated version of Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who! (Random, 1954) stretches the picture book’s slender story line as tautly as a rubber band. For adults, its charms eventually wear thin, but there are enough loud special effects and scary sequences to hold the attention of its preteen audience. But diverting as it may be, my four-and-a-half-year-old taste-tester forgot about the film immediately afterwards. (But to the movie’s credit, it was only the second time he’s ever sat through an entire screening.)
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Photo courtesy of Blue Sky Studios |
Jim Carrey, refreshingly sedate, voices the role of the sensitive elephant Horton, who hears a diminutive cry from a speck of clover and, knowing it holds some form of life—no matter how small—protectively shields the clover with his trunk. He announces his discovery to his friends and catches the scornful attention of Kangaroo (Carol Burnett), the film’s authority figure. She accuses Horton of poisoning the young minds of the jungle of Nool; he’ll have the younger animals using their imaginations in no time, leading to anarchy and disrespect. “Our way of life is under attack!” She plots with the black-bottomed eagle Vlad Vlad-i-koff (Will Arnett impersonating Bela Lugosi) to steal away and destroy the clover.
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Photo courtesy of Blue Sky Studios |
Oddly, a certain gender bias seeps into the silliness. Who-ville’s bumbling mayor is the father of a large brood of 96 “girly girls,” but his mayoralty will be handed down, as it has for countless generations, to his only son, the blank-faced, mop-topped Jo-Jo. Except for one nutty scientist and the scornful Kangaroo, the passive female characters occupy the traditional roles of stand-by-your-who housewife and dithering gossip.
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Photo courtesy of Blue Sky Studios |
Directed by Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino
88 min.
Rated G
