From Page to Screen
Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino’s
Horton Hears a Who!

by Christine M. Heppermann

If only a Who was all moviegoers had to hear. Blue Sky Studios’ windbag adaptation of the Dr. Seuss classic about an elephant who becomes chief advocate for a community of miniscule dust-speck dwellers blabs on and on without saying much. In the 1970s animated film directed by Chuck Jones, two worlds — one big, one small — doubted the existence of the other and thus extended Horton’s story into a zippy and succinct lesson in solipsism. This new CGI version, however, loses the person’s-a-person message amidst all its filler. Jim Carrey’s Horton is the Jungle of Nool’s nutty professor, inexpertly teaching nature class to area youngsters (except for Rudy the kangaroo, whose sourpuss mother, voiced by Carol Burnett, “pouch-schools” him). The computer-animated jungle teems with appealingly unnatural Day-Glo flora and fauna, while Who-ville sports Seussian gizmos and décor, including an elaborate maze of beds for the mayor’s ninety-six daughters. There are some funny lines, and they don’t all come from Carrey or Steve Carell’s mayor. When Horton defends his devotion to the dust speck with a line borrowed from Horton Hatches the Egg, “I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An elephant’s faithful, one hundred percent,” Horton’s mouse sidekick, Morton (Seth Rogen), retorts that it might be in Horton’s best interest to dial back to ninety-nine percent to avoid being run out of town. And the kangaroo’s declaration that Horton’s jabbering to invisible Whos will poison young minds gets corroborating evidence when Horton’s students present their own clovers, one girl enthusiastically proclaiming that “in my world, everyone’s a pony, and they eat rainbows and poop butterflies!” In Who-ville, the mayor repeatedly tries to convince townspeople of the inconvenient truth that, say, summer snow isn’t normal, and Al Gore–like tells his people that they are doomed: if they won’t believe in Horton, it’s Who-Armageddon. Horton and the mayor’s parallel quests seem to take longer than Sam-I-Am’s dietary conversion, and dragging out the action drains the urgency from the Whos’ plight. The story’s climactic finish, in which an angry mob dangles the dust speck over boiling Beezle-nut oil, is almost welcome — anything to stop all the yapping and yopping. Hopefully, Hollywood won’t decide to tackle Go, Dog, Go!, so we won’t ever have to know what it’s like to feel relief that Dog finally went.

Christine M. Heppermann, a reviewer for The Horn Book Magazine, lives in Minneapolis.

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