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Jimmy Hayward
and Steve Martino's Horton Hears A Who! (2008), the digitally animated
adaptation of the Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) classic is easily
the best to come out in recent years - which isn't exactly high
praise. Ron Howard's How the Grinch Stole Christmas" (2000) had
a green and fuzzy Jim Carrey caper charmlessly through a bloated,
digitally enhanced movie; The Cat in the Hat (2003) had Mike Myers
do it all over again, this time in a cat suit.
Easily the best adaptation of the lot remains the 1966 version of
Grinch with Boris Karloff unforgettably grumpy as the eponymous
creature, and Chuck Jones injecting much-needed wit into what has
always struck me as an otherwise saccharine Christmas perennial
(but then I consider the entire season is saccharine). It helps
that Jones' animated short came in at a lean 30 minutes; Seuss should
really be taken in brief doses, if one has to take him at all.
I haven't seen
Jones' 1970 version of Horton - presumably yet another 26 minutes
of Jones improving on Geisel's work - but I'm guessing I'm not too
far off when I say that that must look like a masterpiece of economy
and felicity and grace compared to this production (never mind the
difference in budget), which runs for about three times that length.
Geisel reportedly approved of Jones' Grinch; he probably spun in
his grave upon viewing the two big-budget productions, is rocking
uneasily inside his coffin at the prospect of watching this one.
What's missing,
you might ask? I'm not quite sure myself. The voice performances
are pretty nifty - Jim Carrey's Horton does impersonations of Henry
Kissinger and Al Gore all the while he's channeling William Shatner
as Captain Kirk (which has always been Carrey's default dialogue
delivery style).
The slapstick is inventive enough when not doing the standard-issue
ploy of imitating every amusement park ride this side of Disney
World (American animators have this unshakeable belief, it seems
to me [or is there some handbook hidden away somewhere?], that something
fun and visually spectacular and even dangerously imitable must
happen onscreen every five seconds, or the kiddies will start looking
for the exit ["Mom! I want more soda! Mom, I want more candy!" "Mom!
I need to go to the bathroom now!" "Mom! I went to the bathroom
in my pants - don't need to go no more!"].)
I'm of two minds about this picture dropping some of the more outré
humor found in Cat and Grinch (parents need to be entertained, after
all, just upping the number of pratfalls won't do it) until I remember
Carrey's (and Myers') green (and white) furred face (I can see them
slowly merging into a single horrifying close-up), and I stop feeling
uneasy - they know exactly where they can insert their attempts
at adult humor, sideways.
The plot is
nothing new: Horton is your classic loner rebel of an elephant who
must struggle to have the rest of the Nool Jungle community believe
that he really does hold the entire town of Whoville in a speck
of dust in a flower held at the tip of his trunk (think Eliot protecting
a microbe-sized E.T., or poor David struggling for the attention
of disbelieving adults in the 1953 Invaders From Mars).
Perhaps the one twist in the story is the difference in scale, Horton
being an elephant and the Whoville community being microscopic -
"A person's a person, no matter how small," people say during the
course of the picture (a theme Richard Matheson and Jack Arnold
has already dealt with, in subtler and more poignant manner, in
the great 1957 classic The Incredible Shrinking Man (and I haven't
even mentioned Jonathan Swift)).
But Geisel's not satisfied with that old chestnut; he has to replicate
the storyline all over again in miniature, with the Mayor of Whoville
(Steve Carell) trying to convince the citizens that they are in
danger. If the filmmakers had pointed up the parallelism, maybe
shown how the conversation on a macro scale affects matters on a
micro scale - but no, that would be too sophisticated; we just get
story on one end of the clover, basically the same story re-told
at the other.
There are a
few grace notes - there's blackly comic mileage made from the Whoville
patriarchs desperately trying to put the best face on things, even
when the whole world's falling apart around them (any reference
to Al Gore and his campaign against global warming is always welcome),
and no movie with the guts to play REO Speedwagon's I Can't Fight
This Feeling Anymore as a straight-faced climactic musical number
can be utterly bad.
Little Katie (voiced by Joey King) has such terrifyingly adorable
eyes, and her one memorable line is so utterly demented ("In my
world everyone is a pony, and they all eat rainbows, and poop butterflies")
I'm disappointed she doesn’t snap and sink her teeth into someone's
leg - but then I'm forgetting the nature of the sensibility that
inspired all this.
It's not bad,
actually, but it doesn't exactly rock one's world, does it? Partly
it's the animation - I've yet to see a 100 per cent digitally animated
film evoke or exceed the beauty of handpainted animation (much prefer
to see digital animation confined to one corner, made to behave
itself, and perform only when called upon (see Studio Ghibli's use
of the same in, say, Hauru no ugoku shiro (Howl's Moving Castle,
2004)), or in Steve Box and Nick Park's Wallace and Gromit in "The
Curse of the Were-Rabbit (Wallace and Gromit in 'The Curse of the
Were-Rabbit,'" released the same year).
Partly it's
the source material - never been a fan of Dr. Seuss' brand of nursery
whimsy and safe-as-houses moralizing, and the idea of eating green
eggs with ham only makes me queasy. Which makes one ask - when is
Tim Burton going to do a film version of Maurice Sendak's Where
the Wild Things Are? If we're going to continue translating children's
literature to the big screen, we might as well try adopting something
with real teeth.
Comments?
Email me at noelbotevera@yahoo.com
First published in Businessworld, 03.28.08.
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