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HORTON HEARS A WHO!
Directed by Jimmy Hayward and Steven Martino.
Featuring the voices of Jim Carrey, Steve Carell, Carol Burnett. Now playing.
3 1/2 Stars

Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel) was notoriously choosy about approving adaptations of his books, and he continued to be so right up until his death in 1991. Except for a handful of TV specials in the ’60s and early ’70s, Seuss’ characters mostly remained on the printed page. 

And so, after his death, the Seuss family had some money to make. In a couple of short years we had the Broadway musical Seussical, and the terrible live-action treatments of How the Grinch Stole Christmas and The Cat in the Hat. Each offering worse than the last. It seemed that those stinkers may have brought the good doctor’s widow to her senses, causing her to decree that there would be no more live-action assaults on Seuss’ work. Horton Hears a Who! is the first installment to the Seuss canon after his estate’s back-to-basics, animation-only mandate.

Horton (voiced by Jim Carrey), a helpful elephant, happily wanders the jungles of Nool. He spends his day teaching the younger animals the ways of the wild, all the while keeping out of the way of the super-strict Sour Kangaroo (Burnett) and her mindless simian lackeys, the Wikersham brothers. 

On his travels, Horton spies a speck of dust floating through the air—a very special speck. Horton hears a little voice emanating from the speck, small enough to ignore perhaps, but he jumps into action to hear more. He soon discovers that the speck is home to the tiny town of Whoville, inhabited by the happy Whos, oblivious to the fact that their whole world could be destroyed at any time by a gentle breeze. 

The exception is the mayor (Steve Carell), who is also the only Who who can hear Horton and vice versa. Both try to struggle to bring the Whos’ plight to others’ attention, but are doubted at every turn. They decide to ignore everyone’s advice to stop paying the strange voices any attention, be it a little one from a pink dandelion or the voice of an invisible elephant who lives in the sky, and work together to save Whoville from destruction.

This movie is amazing to look at. I’ve waited a really long time to see the worlds of Dr. Seuss brought to life onscreen. The voicework is unobtrusive and nuanced (for a cartoon). I’m notoriously bad at sitting through animated movies—usually I spent the entire time trying to pick out the celebrity cameos—but here I was so engrossed, I didn’t even try.

The Shrek-style pop culture references are kept to a minimum, and the occasional “winks” to the audience are actually pretty funny: as one Who counts the number of friends she has on her WhoSpace page, another is reminded of his Who-Dentist appointment where he’ll be getting a Who-Root Canal, to which he replies, “Just because you put ‘Who’ in front of everything doesn’t make it any cuter, or hurt any less!”

Unlike so many other recent animated movies, Horton Hears a Who! doesn’t suffer from that smug sense of self-awareness that invalidates any message they pretend to be propagating. Horton Hears a Who! has a moral message, one that’s even stronger because it’s so open to interpretation. If this movie has the same effect on kids today as the book did on me, they’ll be asking some pretty existential questions for years to come.