(2008) Here's a hoot (sort of). Here's a what? A Who! What's a who? It's an animated (with Whoville's characters just like the book's illustrations), expanded version of Dr Seuss's children's classic with Charles Osgood narrating in rhyme. Jim Carrey voices Horton the elephant who goes all out to save from destruction a miniature world of happy people residing in a tiny town on a speck of dust attached to a clover blossom.

Fearful of Horton's infecting the children's thinking, including her overprotected Rudy, with his imagination, Mrs Kangaroo (Carol Burnett's voice), an adherent of materialism, orchestrates an all out assault by the other creatures in the jungle - with the exception of Morton (Seth Rogen's voice), the blue mouse - against Horton because of his crazy, mystical claim that people exist on a mote upon a flower: "If you can't hear, see, or feel something, it doesn't exist." (But kangaroos don't exist in the jungle with elephants and moneys, do they?)

Nonetheless, Horton insists: "A person's a person, no matter how small." Steve Carell speaks for Whoville's mayor, father of 96 daughters and a single son, Jojo. Similarly the mayor has great difficulty in convincing his constituents of a giant elephant invisibly talking to him out of the sky.

His own freedom and safety threatened along with Whoville, Horton nevertheless refuses to relinquish the clover: "I mean what I say,/ And I said what I meant./ An elephant's faithful/ One hundred percent."

The vast right-wing conspiracy's been at it again: I couldn't help thinking of Mrs Kangaroo as Hillary Clinton and Horton as the most compassionate pipedream of a Republican, all conceived well before John McCain became the only Republican left (I mean remaining) in the race and Barack Obama's unexpectedly taking on the junior senator from New York. Naw! Just projecting my imagination onto a screen cluttered with tiny points of colored lights - until I found a similar interpretation in a blog.

Click here for links to places to buy or rent this movie in video and/or DVD format, or to buy the soundtrack, posters, books, even used videos, games, electronics and lots of other stuff. I suggest you shop at least two of these places before buying anything. Prices seem to vary continuously. For more information on this film, click on this link to The Internet Movie Database. Type in the name of the movie in the search box and press enter. You will be able to find background information on the film, the actors, and links to much more information.

Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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