No Matter How Smallish: Horton Hears a Who!
By Matt Zoller Seitz
After the live-action debacles of The Grinch and The Cat in the Hat -- bad bananas with greasy black peels -- I approached Horton Hears a Who! with dread; I'm therefore torn between expressing relief that this cartoon version of Dr. Seuss' classic exceeded my expectations, and conceding that my expectations couldn't have been much lower. For what it's worth, my kids, aged 10 and 4, were enthralled from start to finish, their dad found the experience mostly painless and sometimes pleasurable, and there weren't any inappropriate sexual references to homina-homina through on the way home.
In filling out Seuss' story-in-verse about a kindly elephant protecting a dust-speck world, the filmmakers have padded their running time with gracefully choreographed but needlessly long, convoluted action scenes, and glommed new characters and subplots onto a narrative that got along fine without them. I'm not sure why Horton the elephant, a persecuted true believer voiced by Jim Carrey, needed to be given a voice-of-caution sidekick mouse voiced by Seth Rogen and various mammalian pals that look up to him; nor can I see why the mayor of Whoville (Steve Carell) had to be given a parallel narrative in which he tries to convince his skeptical citizens that there's a world beyond their sight. (This last embellishment seems to have been cribbed from the 1970 network TV version, directed by Chuck Jones -- an adaptation which, if I recall, felt long even at 26 minutes.) These touches and others seem like nods to guru screenwriter William Goldman's notorious admonition to "give the star everything" -- even though the stars here, Carrey and Carell, are dads who were presumably thrilled to play beloved children's book characters and didn't need to have their virtual keesters kissed (at least I hope they didn't; I hate to picture Carell telling the studio, "Yeah, I'll play the mayor -- if you give me as many lines as that s.o.b. Carrey"). The movie's usually so true to Seuss' spirit that when it throws in rote 21st century children's entertainment elements -- half-assed pop culture references; a last-minute singalong to REO Speedwagon's "I Can't Fight This Feeling Anymore" in a film that was musical-number-free up till then; a father-son reconciliation subplot between the mayor of Whoville and his disaffected son, Jo-Jo (a lone shirker in Seuss' book, unrelated to the mayor) -- you notice it more than you might in a a Shrek or Ice Age movie with a less respectable pedigree but a more boisterously junky style.
All in all, though, the ratio of innocent enthusiasm to commercial cartoon formula is higher than I expected. Co-directors Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino, scriptwriters Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio and the animators from Blue Sky (the Ice Age studio) have managed to adapt Seuss without turning him out, which I guess counts as progress. And the movie is a treat for the eyes, fleshing out the good Doctor's twisty 2-D doodles without making them overdetermined or oppressive. The all-but-mandatory computer-animation cliche of swooping/diving perspective shots -- flourishes that usually defy gravity so brazenly that after a while, you subconsciously realize that it's all ones and zeros and cease being dazzled -- are deployed here for artistically defensible reasons: to show the speck being dislodged by rainwater and drifting like Forrest Gump's feather, or (better yet) to raise us high above Horton and his fellow creatures, the better to emphasize that Whos and jungle beasts alike are part of a cosmic continuum too vast to comprehend. (Did Terrence Malick direct second unit?)
I like the Junior League-mom-from-hell spin that Carol Burnett gives to the busybody kangaroo's haughty killjoy lines, and Will Arnett's gruff Russo-English patois as jerk vulture Vlad Vladikoff, who swipes the clover containing Horton's dust speck and drops it into a valley filled with millions of clovers, and the high-angled shot of Horton working his way through the clover valley, piling the picked-over and discarded flowers into droopy columns whose pseudopod-like shape is unmistakably Seussian. None of this mitigates the fact that the ideal length for Horton is however long it takes to read it to my toddler. And while I realize Carell's a comic genius who could crush me with his wallet, I'll put my freaked-out, Munchkin-sounding Mayor of Whoville up against his lovable milquetoast reading any day. A star turn's a star turn, no matter how smallish.
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Matt Zoller Seitz is publisher of The House Next Door.
After the live-action debacles of The Grinch and The Cat in the Hat -- bad bananas with greasy black peels -- I approached Horton Hears a Who! with dread; I'm therefore torn between expressing relief that this cartoon version of Dr. Seuss' classic exceeded my expectations, and conceding that my expectations couldn't have been much lower. For what it's worth, my kids, aged 10 and 4, were enthralled from start to finish, their dad found the experience mostly painless and sometimes pleasurable, and there weren't any inappropriate sexual references to homina-homina through on the way home. In filling out Seuss' story-in-verse about a kindly elephant protecting a dust-speck world, the filmmakers have padded their running time with gracefully choreographed but needlessly long, convoluted action scenes, and glommed new characters and subplots onto a narrative that got along fine without them. I'm not sure why Horton the elephant, a persecuted true believer voiced by Jim Carrey, needed to be given a voice-of-caution sidekick mouse voiced by Seth Rogen and various mammalian pals that look up to him; nor can I see why the mayor of Whoville (Steve Carell) had to be given a parallel narrative in which he tries to convince his skeptical citizens that there's a world beyond their sight. (This last embellishment seems to have been cribbed from the 1970 network TV version, directed by Chuck Jones -- an adaptation which, if I recall, felt long even at 26 minutes.) These touches and others seem like nods to guru screenwriter William Goldman's notorious admonition to "give the star everything" -- even though the stars here, Carrey and Carell, are dads who were presumably thrilled to play beloved children's book characters and didn't need to have their virtual keesters kissed (at least I hope they didn't; I hate to picture Carell telling the studio, "Yeah, I'll play the mayor -- if you give me as many lines as that s.o.b. Carrey"). The movie's usually so true to Seuss' spirit that when it throws in rote 21st century children's entertainment elements -- half-assed pop culture references; a last-minute singalong to REO Speedwagon's "I Can't Fight This Feeling Anymore" in a film that was musical-number-free up till then; a father-son reconciliation subplot between the mayor of Whoville and his disaffected son, Jo-Jo (a lone shirker in Seuss' book, unrelated to the mayor) -- you notice it more than you might in a a Shrek or Ice Age movie with a less respectable pedigree but a more boisterously junky style. All in all, though, the ratio of innocent enthusiasm to commercial cartoon formula is higher than I expected. Co-directors Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino, scriptwriters Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio and the animators from Blue Sky (the Ice Age studio) have managed to adapt Seuss without turning him out, which I guess counts as progress. And the movie is a treat for the eyes, fleshing out the good Doctor's twisty 2-D doodles without making them overdetermined or oppressive. The all-but-mandatory computer-animation cliche of swooping/diving perspective shots -- flourishes that usually defy gravity so brazenly that after a while, you subconsciously realize that it's all ones and zeros and cease being dazzled -- are deployed here for artistically defensible reasons: to show the speck being dislodged by rainwater and drifting like Forrest Gump's feather, or (better yet) to raise us high above Horton and his fellow creatures, the better to emphasize that Whos and jungle beasts alike are part of a cosmic continuum too vast to comprehend. (Did Terrence Malick direct second unit?) I like the Junior League-mom-from-hell spin that Carol Burnett gives to the busybody kangaroo's haughty killjoy lines, and Will Arnett's gruff Russo-English patois as jerk vulture Vlad Vladikoff, who swipes the clover containing Horton's dust speck and drops it into a valley filled with millions of clovers, and the high-angled shot of Horton working his way through the clover valley, piling the picked-over and discarded flowers into droopy columns whose pseudopod-like shape is unmistakably Seussian. None of this mitigates the fact that the ideal length for Horton is however long it takes to read it to my toddler. And while I realize Carell's a comic genius who could crush me with his wallet, I'll put my freaked-out, Munchkin-sounding Mayor of Whoville up against his lovable milquetoast reading any day. A star turn's a star turn, no matter how smallish.Matt Zoller Seitz is publisher of The House Next Door.
posted by Matt Zoller Seitz at 12:08 AM
4 Comments:
Matt, I remember thinking I'd never seen a piece of literature, written for children or adults, raped and left by the side of the road so thoroughly as the violation done to The Cat in the Hat. So my expectations were probably just as low as yours were. And I agree with your objections about the wedging-in of the REO Speedwagon tune at the end-- the temptation to Shrek-ify the tale was obviously overwhelming. (But I'd rather deal with that than a joke like Horton's trunk standing at attention over the arrival of some Seussian jungle beauty.)
I really don't have a problem with the length of the movie, however, because I felt the level of inspiration, and the choices that were made to fatten the story up to feature length were pretty sound-- I felt the mayor's story, however much it eventually dips into the familiar father-son reconciliation theme of every other cartoon ever made, also functions to strengthen the original story's theme of faith in the unseen, which can carry with it religious ramifications or not. (And as extraneous as it was, Horton's anime-inspired hero fantasy was pretty hilarious.) Plus, the movie is rendered with so much visual beauty and wit that I was seduced beyond my usual nitpicking almost immediately.
Finally, though, as an experience with my daughters it ranks as one of the best ever. We saw it on a rainy, cold Saturday night at a drive-in-- everybody was in pajamas, huddled together and tucked under as many pillows and blankets as we could cram in the back of my minivan, watching it with the speakers turned up to juuuuust the right volume and the back hatch popped open onto the giant, bright screen and the chilly night air. It was like a wonderful three-hour camping trip (even the co-feature, Alvin and the Chipmunks, was okay under these circumstances), and the girls snoozed all the way home. And it was made all the better by a terrific feature cartoon we could all enjoy. Thanks for your usual sharp and insightful review. I just wish more people could see it the way I did!
Dennis: "Finally, though, as an experience with my daughters it ranks as one of the best ever."
Yep. Me, too. It was my four-year old's first movie in a theater. I could have taken him before now, but I held off, partly because I wanted to be reasonably sure he'd have the attention span and bathroom control to sit through an entire feature, but also because I wanted his first movie to be something that had the possibility of being, if not great, than at least not toxic. He thoroughly enjoyed the film, and was overjoyed when, during the "We are here, we are here!" section, you could see one of the Whos banging on a cranberry can. For some reason, whenever we read the book he fixates on the cranberry can and finds it hilarious.
I don't suppose any of what we're talking about constitutes a tough critical evaluation. Or does it?
Ah, it all depends on your audience!
It's really nifty to hear about your boy's reaction, especially to a detail like that cranberry can. If that's not a great argument for awareness of every aspect of adapting a beloved story like Horton, and maintaining some kind of fidelity to it visually and thematically, I don't know what is. Your son got to make a connection between two forms of storytelling that made the newer one even richer for him. Sounds like he's got his dad's keen eyes too.
I wonder how long we'll have to wait, now that raiding the Seuss canon has officially become a very lucrative trend, before we see a CGI-cartoon version of my favorite, the naturally cinematic Bartholomew and the Oobleck? If and when they do consider it, I hope these filmmakers are involved.
One element of your experience I didn't have to deal with: being at the drive-in, rather than worry about an inopportune cry of "I gotta pee!" I just brought along the portable pottie. Talk about relaxed-- my daughters, I mean. When my time came, I locked the doors and schlumped to the snack bar like a grown-up.
Also, I couldn't agree more about the appalling treatment of "The Cat in the Hat." It gave me bad memories of seeing "Space Jam" in a theater. For me it's a toss-up as to which one is more a violation of a classic children's entertainment property. I might have to give the slight edge to "Space Jam," because at least the Cat's vulgar snottiness was vaguely true to the spirit of that character, whereas "Space Jam" offered us the sorry spectacle of several of the most independent-minded cartoon characters of all time -- led by Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck -- cravenly worshiping a basketball player.
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