The excitable sidekick is another such requirement, and here that duty is taken on by Seth Rogen in the role of Morton, a motor-mouthed mouse who is Horton’s best friend. It just feels like something they know they’re supposed to do. You don’t get the sense that the writers (Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul) actually believe in it. Seuss’s work but that it’s tired and sentimental. The problem with this father-son reconciliation narrative is not that it is un-Seussian though such intergenerational melodrama almost never figured in Dr. The Mayor of Who-ville, voiced by Steve Carell, is a beleaguered dad who has trouble communicating with his son, a moody emo boy named Jo-Jo. Seuss’s fable with pages from the battered, worn-out Hollywood family-film playbook.Īll kinds of extraneous elements are added to the story. When it comes to telling the story, however, and drawing out the dimensions of the characters, this “Horton” supplements Dr.

(A chase through a field of bright pink clover is lovely and thrilling.) The filmmakers revel in the imaginative freedom their image-making technology affords, and use it with self-confidence and flair, especially in action sequences.

And the Jungle of Nool, where Horton passes his time and fights for survival of the Whos, is appropriately lush, inviting and strange.īut if “Horton Hears a Who!” offers a showcase of the visual inventiveness and technical flair that characterizes Hollywood-financed children’s animation these days, it also shows some of the limitations of the computer-animation, talking-animal genre. Who-ville in particular that speck-borne town with its spindly machinery and gravity-defying architecture is a wondrously kinetic place. The animation is free, supple and brightly colored, and the crazy curves and angles that Seuss arranged on the page pop into three dimensions with rubbery energy and elastic wit.

Unlike “The Grinch” and “The Cat,” “Horton” does not try to flesh out the good doctor’s graphical world by means of sets, prosthetic makeup and the other accouterments of live-action moviemaking. There are aspects of “Horton,” directed by Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino under the auspices of the 20th Century Fox animation unit responsible for the “Ice Age” movies, that are fresh and enjoyable, and bits that will gratify even a dogmatic and orthodox Seussian. That’s faint praise, I know, and I’m even willing to go a bit further. Seuss film adaptations “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” and “The Cat in the Hat,” in case you need reminding is that it is not one of the worst movies ever made.

What distinguishes “Horton Hears a Who!” from the other recent Dr.

Horton hears a who speck