Text size:

'Horton Hears a Who'

Rating:

BY GENE SEYMOUR | gene.seymour@newsday.com

Not that the bar is all that high to begin with, considering 2000's frantically overcooked "Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas" and 2003's appallingly unfunny "Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat." But whether by default or not, "Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who!" is the first feature-length Seuss movie adaptation to adequately evoke the warmhearted eccentricity of Theodore Geisel's classic children's books.

Part of the problem is that there's only so much stretching and tugging a big-screen movie can do with Geisel's slender stories without the whole thing somehow going "Voom," as it were. "Horton" often finds itself hard-pressed to draw out the story about its eponymous bucolic elephant ( Jim Carrey) determined to save a microscopic civilization called Who-Ville from extinction despite a priggish, naysaying Kangaroo ( Carol Burnett) obsessed with proving Who-Ville and its denizens to be delusions of Horton's warped mind.

It always helps, of course, when the digitally animated characters look so much like the ones in Seuss' original book that they seem to have leapt off the page into three-dimensional form. They all convey a rubbery charm, from Who-Ville's beleaguered Mayor (Steve Carell) and his 90-plus offspring to the Wickersham clan, a multigenerational army of gorillas capable of firing dozens of bananas from their armpits at moving targets.

The visual pleasures only begin there. Both the jungle landscape that Horton the Elephant calls home and the bucolic little town of Who-Ville that somehow exists on a tiny white mote are depicted with rich detail. (Even the tall grass has personality.) And that goofball gadgetry so cherished by Seuss-a-holics (telescopes whose attachments seem to extend indefinitely) is faithfully, lovingly replicated.

One can't say that co-directors Steve Marino and Jimmy Hayward (a veteran animator who worked on such Disney- Pixar hits as "Toy Story" and "Monsters Inc.") don't offer a lot of juicy, fruity eye candy for our investment of time and money.

Still, after a while, you do start to notice the movie trying too hard to sustain its antic momentum. There are, for a change, a few sight gags that actually take their time arriving at a payoff. But while Carrey's freewheeling spritzes can be amusing at intervals, they are also symptomatic of dialogue that runs off the rails into nervous, faux-topical chatter. And there are many scenes, most especially the climax, that seem to be milked to within an inch of outright insufferability.

All that said, it remains difficult to tell you to keep away from "Horton Hears a Who!" if for no other reason than its still all-too-timely encouragement of open-mindedness. Seuss books were among the 20th century's greatest briefs for the autonomy of imagination against stunted minds and hearts. This adaptation leaves plenty of room for improvement in subsequent attempts, but at least it nails down the source's surface textures, which is (barely) enough.

DR. SEUSS' HORTON HEARS A WHO! (G). The timeless (as in, always timely) story of an elephant's devotion to endangered microscopic creatures is given a digitally animated treatment that, on looks alone, is faithful to Dr. Seuss' original vision. Voices include Jim Carrey (as Horton) Steve Carell, Carol Burnett, Will Arnett, Amy Poehler and Seth Rogen. 1:22 (some scary moments for smaller children). At area theaters.