![]() There was an earlier half-hour animated adaptation Horton Hears a Who! (1970) from director Chuck Jones who had also made the classic animated version of Dr Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966). Aside from various animated specials produced for tv, the best Dr Seuss adaptation has been the original film treatment he wrote himself The 5000 Fingers of Dr T (1953). In recent years, there have been a spate of live-action Dr Seuss adaptations with How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) and The Cat in the Hat (2003) but both of these ended up being hated – they alternately drowning Seuss’s nonsense humour and wordplay in over-production, noisy slapstick and icky substances fights. There was also some controversy in the 1980s when Horton’s catchphrase “a person’s a person, no matter how small” was appropriated by the Right to Life movement, something that was fiercely denounced by Dr Seuss’s widow.ĭr Seuss’s work has fared variably on the big screen. Horton Hears a Who! is an interestingly political work where Dr Seuss is said to have based the character of the sour kangaroo and her crusade against ideological correctness on Senator Joseph McCarthy who ran a campaign to purge suspected Communist sympathisers from the US government in the 1950s. ![]() Dr Seuss published Horton Hears a Who! in 1954 – it was a sequel to an earlier Seuss work Horton Hatches an Egg (1940), wherein the title elephant is ridiculed for agreeing to sit in a tree and mind a bird’s nest while its mother take a leave of absence. ![]() Certainly, Horton Hears a Who!, their fourth feature-length film, was their most successful film up to that point and opened at the No 1 spot at the box-office in almost every country around the world.įor Horton Hears a Who!, Blue Sky have turned to one of the children’s books of Dr Seuss. Blue Sky’s animated films have yet to win them the endearing love that each new Pixar film is greeted with – they still seem stuck down at the level of earnest Pixar wannabes. Blue Sky Studios first appeared with the successful Ice Age (2002) and then went onto Robots (2005), Ice Age 2 (2006), Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009), Rio (2011), Ice Age: Continental Drift (2012), Epic (2013), Rio 2 (2014), The Peanuts Movie (2015), Ice Age: Collision Course (2016), Ferdinand (2017) and Spies in Disguise (2019). In the last few years, the visual effects company Blue Sky Studios has transformed into a CGI animation company and started to give Pixar and others a run for their money in terms of competing for the increasingly more lucrative animation box-office dollar. Horton attempts to carry the clover to a place of safety atop Mount Nool but the kangaroo has hired the vulture Vlad to destroy the clover. His claims to be hearing Horton’s voice are ridiculed by the members of the council who regard him as a boob because they are determined that nothing ever goes wrong in Whoville. At the same time, Ned realizes that chaos is being caused in Whoville because the clover is being moved around. When others children start imitating Horton, the sour kangaroo determines to destroy the clover. ![]() Horton’s claim to having a speck of dust with people living on it is ridiculed by a sour kangaroo who insists that the animals only believe in what they can see, hear and feel. Horton’s voice is able to be heard by Ned McDodd, the mayor of Whoville, because it is amplified through the arrangement of pipes on his house, while Horton is the only one able to hear Ned because of his large ears. He realizes that the speck of dust is an entire world inhabited by a race of people. He chases after the speck and rescues it as it settles on a clover. In the jungle of Nool, Horton the elephant is having a bath when a speck of dust blows past him and he hears a voice faintly crying from it. ![]()
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