Dr. Seuss tapped into a kind of whimsy I don’t think this world will ever see again. He wrote about our potential to be more than we are, our infinite capacity to love, couching it all in a psychotropic fantasy no amount of narcotics could ever hope to match. When I hear someone say, “Oh the places you’ll go,” I feel safe, as if there were a friendly cat and an infinite amount of colored, numerical fish waiting behind each word in that sentence.
While this film doesn’t achieve that level of magic, what it does achieve is a little return to innocence. Although we all have our favorite kids’ movies — the ones we can recite on cue (Shrek, Finding Nemo, The Lion King, etc.), those kinds of movies generally have a common denominator. They’re animated, witty, accessible to adults and mainly safe. We don’t return to the theatres, year in and year out, expecting these kinds of movies to wow us. We do it because our inner child never stops whispering in our ears. The lights go down, the curtains part, sound breathes through the dark room and we age backward a little as the minutes slip away.
Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who is no break from this formula. Starring Jim Carrey as the curious Horton the elephant, the film follows his journey to protect a single speck on a single flower. On that speck lies the land of Whoville, whose mayor (Steve Carrell) is trying to be a good father to his socially distant son Jojo and his 96 other daughters.
Both of their worlds get unhinged when the two begin to communicate with one another and are each ostracized for their efforts. A mob of jungle animals is mounted against Horton, who believe the elephant will corrupt the children with his nonsense talk of tiny people and other worlds. The mayor faces equal difficulty in convincing his people that their world faces annihilation if Horton can’t bring the speck to safety.
As far the message goes, Dr. Seuss is felt most strongly here. It tries its best to tell everyone, not just kids, that new ways of thinking about the world may be scary, but they aren’t wrong. That love, faith and even sacrifice are no small price to pay for living in a better world.
However, some of that Seuss charm is lost in the dialogue, as the rhyming meter of the books is relegated exclusively to the narration. I respect that doing an entire script in rhymes would have been difficult and possibly aggravating as a final product, but I feel like a more healthy balance could have been achieved. I mean, this is Dr. Seuss we’re talking about, so the dialogue being structured like a normal kids’ movie rubbed me the wrong way. Not that it doesn’t work — the movie is pretty funny for the first 45 minutes or so, but the comedy slowly slips away in favor of story and some impassioned action sequences — and when the jokes are what the movie has going for it, their absence becomes sorely missed.
In Shrek, when comedy disappeared for drama, I was literally ripped apart as I heard the words of Leonard Cohen call across the ether while Fiona and Shrek ate solemnly at their respective dinner tables. Here there’s less pain and more keeping the kids happy with action scenes.
If you feel a need to return to innocence — you’ve seen too many dramas recently, or you don’t want to give your girlfriend the opportunity to make you watch Penelope, Fool’s Gold or Drillbit Taylor, take a gander at Horton and friends. It’s nothing you need to see, or will ever watch again, but if you know anything at all about the magic I was talking about earlier, you’ll know if that’s what you need right now.