As part of my arduous Spring Break duties, I took Child to see "Horton Hears a Who" yesterday. And I'm actually not kidding about the whole "arduous" part, because I have managed to get sick AGAIN. It was "Two for 'Horton:' one child, one zombie."
Child and Zombie stumbled down to the UltraScreen. She watched, I stared.
You could really see the gears of the story grinding. "Here comes the next test of Horton's mettle--a rope bridge!"
The Seussian surreality-machines of Whoville were delightful, though, and Carol Burnett as the smarmy kangaroo nemesis was glorious. (She won't let her kid play with other children or go to school with them so that he won't be tainted by any viewpoints which differ from her own.)
I felt, though, that Jim Carrey and Steve Carell's voices sounded oddly alike as the two leads, Horton and the Mayor. Maybe it was just me. But that was how it seemed to me, and I ended up wondering if it was deliberate; a way to show kinship, that a kindred spirit is a kindred spirit no matter what sort of differences in scale may exist between them.
Speaking of which: I was not happy with the Mayor's motivation to be "one of the greats." They stop the whole movie for him to wander down a hall full of portraits of past Mayors and rhapsodize about how he someday wants to be like them in stature. That never really seemed to be his story, to me. The Mayor and Horton are outsiders by temperament, gentle, whimsical, imaginative, openminded, and poetic; that's how they find each other, against all odds, and have the capacity to believe in each other despite the improbability of each other's existence.
(And by the way--the movie's stern line that "If you can't hear it, see it, or touch it, it doesn't exist," which is meant to show how narrow-minded people can be when it concerns the imagination, is misplaced. The whole point is that Horton CAN hear the people of Whoville, and they can hear him, when they gather to listen. Whoville's existence is totally empirically verifiable. Imagination's got nothing to do with it. The other animals around Horton can't hear the people of Whoville simply because their own ears aren't big enough.)
But anyhow--Horton and the Mayor are poetic dreamers, not strivers burdened by fears of mediocrity. So I felt that the Mayor's desire to become "great" was tacked-on.
Well. It's easy to criticize. I don't mean it that way. I'm trying to engage with what I saw, and that often means saying where I disagreed with it. That doesn't think I meant it was bad.
(Um. I meant, of course, "That doesn't mean I think it was bad." Sigh. I really need to get back to bed.)
Anyhow: that doesn't mean I think it was bad. Just that I saw things a different way. Bottom line: Horton and the Mayor came through to me strongly enough that I wanted to defend them where I felt the creative team was misunderstanding them.
You know a film has won the day, after all, when even a zombie tears up a little at the end.
