‘Horton Hears a Who!’ a brilliant adaptation

In “Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who!,” the titular CGI elephant imagines a 2D-animated scenario involving an entire family of tiny people clinging for dear life onto a speck of dust, screaming “I want to live!” in a high-pitched wail as they hurtle through space—and suddenly you realize two things about Doctor Seuss: one is that animation is the only viable option for adaptations of the man’s work, in all its deceptively simple glory; live action approximations of the same are only kind of nauseating.

The other is that, my God, you never completely picked up on the terrifying darkness of these books when you read them as a kid, did you? (“Horton Hears a Who!” was the first Seuss-to-film adaptation that forced me to recall “The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins,” which featured a kid sent to have his head chopped off for being unable to take off his hat without another one taking its place—only to be saved by the same conceit.) But in retrospect, the brilliant thing about them was that, beyond his invaluable vocabulary lessons, Seuss presented very serious emotional concepts (imagination, death, loneliness) without ever condescending to his grade-school audience. Finally, now, we have a film that can expand on those ideas without losing sight of the intent of its forebears.

Certainly the film operates by the core story of Horton the Elephant (voice of Jim Carrey), who’s positive that he heard a small “yelp” emanating from the speck of dust that just floated by his ear. Indeed he did, for the town of Whoville resides therein; but while the Mayor (Steve Carell) is understandably concerned that his entire world now rests in the hands of a giant pachyderm, at least he finally has an explanation for the strange weather patterns and other life-threatening natural disasters to which his oblivious little burg has been subject as of late. Sound familiar? There’s a particular moment early on that forces you to realize that you’re dealing with an incredibly smart political allegory: when the Mayor sheepishly suggests that “Whocentennial” celebrations should be postponed in the wake of potential Armageddon, the Grinch-like head councilman (Dan Fogler) hits a button embossed with a smiley face—which encases the troublemaker in a soundproof dome and cues soporific elevator music that lulls the Whos back into submissive contentment.

But Horton has his own problems in guarding the speck from certain destruction, as the residents of his jungle turn against him: “If you can’t see it, hear it, or feel it, it doesn’t exist,” insists the uppity Kangaroo (Carol Burnett), and suddenly “Horton Hears a Who!” becomes a fairly complex treatise on the various forms of hubris. The Kangaroo personifies the egotistical inflexibility too often attendant to knee-jerk atheism, which the film places in same category as the Whos’ scary groupthink, a reflection of blind trust in organized religion and the government. Of course, this isn’t to say that “Horton Hears a Who!” is all serious subtext; the film subscribes to a particularly engaging form of slapstick that ranges in tone from the overtly hilarious (a running gag surrounds a stapler in the face—sure, why not?) to the surreal (the Mayor’s arm, accidentally injected with novocaine, flops around uselessly for several scenes). Maybe it all gets a little too cute here and there—the whole of it ending with an REO Speedwagon ballad—but the film’s primary pleasures rest with how it dares to teach its all-ages audience the importance of questioning authority in all its forms, and how it acts as a casual antidote for the Kindergarten fascism of “Shrek the Third” and “Bee Movie.” The film has a genuine love for nonconformism and the generally bizarre, best exemplified by the character of Katie, a sighing, cock-eyed puffball who casually defies the laws of physics. She certainly incites the loudest fits of laughter in a film full of them, but “Horton” merely acknowledges her off-the-wall behavior and accepts her as a friend and a member of the community. After all, we’re all in it together on this speck of dust hurtling through space.