I saw “Horton Hears a Who” this weekend. I was really excited about it because I love Dr. Seuss and it looked great. After seeing it I gotta say, it was. I really loved it, I think it kept fairly true to Seuss, though I haven’t read this particular book, the movie made me want to.
I think that this movie was everything Seuss would want it to be. It looked, sounded and felt like Seuss unlike the previous attempts at recent Seuss movies which largely looked, sounded and felt like crap. I don’t know really how best to explain it, they kept the rhyming, and because it was done with computer animation, the look & feel of it worked like the books did. It looked cartoony. The live action just didn’t ever do justice to Seuss at all, his books are supposed to be toony!!!!
The story and the humor itself was very innocent but still had a great moral behind it. Which in a lot of ways is a nice change of pace from recent children movies which are often littered with sexual innuendos and references to pop culture that kids don’t understand at all. Shrek 1 was OK, but Shrek 2 was so god awful it wasn’t even worth watching 3. But the sad thing is that these movies are so freaking popular that everyone copies them and makes similarily crappy movies that really aren’t that good. This one was different. It returned cartoon movies to a better time, when children movies were meant for children, and were just good enough that everyone would enjoy them.
In a lot of ways this movie was very much like Pixar’s early movies which had similar qualities. I hope whoever made this does well with their next movie because Pixar has been dieing of late. The Incredibles was good but kinda boring, and cars looked awful (was their first that I didn’t even bother seeing). I don’t think they’ve actually done anything truly top quality since Finding Nemo which is seeming like an awful long time ago. Although, I do admit that Wal-E looks really good.