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Horton Hears a Who!

Movie Horton Hears a Who! Director Jimmy Hayward, Steve Martino Cast Jim Carrey, Steve Carell, Carol Burnett, Will Arnett

AP

Horton may hear a Who, but the rest of us may hear a lot of hoopla, and it's not all the charming sort you expect from a benign Seussian world. Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who! succeeds to a point in putting the Hollywood spin on Theodor S. Geisel's beloved children's book about an elephant defending a microscopic civilization. Very young children will find plenty to giggle over in the manic slapstick of this latest computer-animated adventure from Blue Sky Studios, the outfit behind the Ice Age flicks. And Blue Sky's creations are a solid transmutation of Seuss' odd storybook world into digital images. Seuss' rhymes generally give way to loud pratfall nonsense, though, as the filmmakers stretch a thin, thin story to fit a feature-length movie. The result is more amiable than the live-action Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas starring Jim Carrey, who returns to Who-Ville this time as the voice of Horton the elephant. And Horton is a huge leap beyond the atrocious live-action The Cat in the Hat with Mike Myers. All three Seuss renderings share a common problem: The padding needed to take them to the big screen diminish the story, leaving more to gawk at but less to savour. Computer-animation veterans Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino, both making their directing debuts, quickly establish the colourful, carefree life in the jungle of Nool, where the happy Horton co-exists with a menagerie of strange critters. His buddies include the gabby mouse Morton (Seth Rogen), while the creatures of Nool live under the thumb of the self-righteous Kangaroo (Carol Burnett), the snooty equivalent of a small-minded PTA mom. Horton incurs the wrath and ridicule of Kangaroo as he insists he's made an astonishing discovery � an endangered land called Who-Ville that exists in a tiny speck resting on a clover.