Whos Behind "Horton Hears" Give It Heart
Jim Carrey and Steve Carell shine in Blue Sky Studios' digitally animated Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who! The 20th Century Fox movie premiered nationally on Friday and seems poised to dominate the box-office weekend, reports the Los Angeles Times.
The Seussian story unfolds in a colorful jungle inhabited by Horton, an elephant with sharp ears, who one day hears a faint voice emit from a speck. He concludes that tiny creatures inhabit the speck and resolves to protect it and in turn the inhabitants' humanity. The speck, in fact, is Whoville, and a dialogue begins between Whoville's mayor and Horton as the two struggle to preserve Whoville in spite of two parallel uncaring worlds. Only Horton and the mayor, it seems, can actually appreciate the dramatic effects that Horton's world can have on Whoville. In one of the funnier sequences, Horton uses his ears to cover and uncover the speck to make it alternately night and day in Whoville; only the mayor responds in panic, while the rest of the residents merely switch from sunglasses to sans sunglasses.
Carrey gives Horton a dose of playful shyness, and Carell's squirrelly persona allows the mayor to more naturally unhinge. Both actors were made for animation: Carrey broke onto the big screen scene via his jaw-dropping antics in The Mask; Carell became a household name on The Office, thanks to his expressionist faces in reaction shots. It's nice to finally see both actors in something reputable, since, incidentally, the most recent big-marquee picture for both of them was a movie from the regrettable Almighty series (Bruce for Carrey and Evan for Carell).
Stars, or rather voices of stars, of varying calibers, be they of present or past fame, populate the cartoon. Seth Rogen of Knocked Up fame plays the mouse, Morton, Horton's best friend, with a more hyperactive touch of his signature man-child archetype. Television legend Carol Burnett voices the domineering kangaroo who attempts to rule the entire jungle, and plans to destroy Horton's treasured speck, with her even more signature croon. Even husband-wife team Will Arnett, of Arrested Development, and Amy Poehler, of Saturday Night Live, join in on the fun by providing the voices for a hitman vulture and the wife of Carell's mayor, respectively.
Of course, the preponderance of stars in Horton Hears is not an anomaly for a children's movie: as a genre, children's movies draw a remarkable amount of talent. But this particular team, impeccably cast to highlight each star's particular comic flair, makes watching Horton Hears pleasurable, even past that tender age during which one could most appreciate its saccharine, albeit endearingly delivered, theme: the importance of caring and sharing.
Horton Hears explains that one needs to appreciate the personhood of every possible person, even if you cannot immediately apprehend it. More importantly, however, the movie encourages one to awaken from one's blissfully ignorant dream and confront life and its reality as it indeed is. Americans, Blue Sky Studios seems to insist, need to stop shuffling complacently from pillar to post while a late capitalist world unfurls around them. Like the residents of Whoville, we need to stop using sunglasses and other instruments of materiality to block out the pangs of a troubled world; we need to stare that doomed world straight in the eye. How surprisingly Seussian of Fox. Thanks to an adept cast, that emotionally weighty message comes across as heartfelt instead of gimmicky.