Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who!
I'm probably being overly kind rating "Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who!" as more than strictly average computer-animated kiddie fare, but two things swayed me. First, it's a relief not to have to put up with Mike Myers as a cretin in a cat suit. Second, after the Saturday morning screening I attended, every 4-year-old stood and applauded. With a movie like this, they're the critics, not me.
If you have a kid or have ever been one, you know the story. Horton (the voice of Jim Carrey) is a big gormless elephant lumbering happily through the jungle until the day he hears a voice coming from a dust-speck. On that speck is the entire village of Whoville, and in that village is the Mayor of Whoville (Steve Carell).
This is the kind of perspective-altering insight familiar to decades of dorm-room stoners, and "Hor ton" lays it out straight: "Your whole world fits on a flower in my world - we're in the middle of some amazing cosmic convergence!" Whoa.
Unfortunately, the rest of the jungle thinks Horton's hallucinating. Led by a fascist soccer-mom kangaroo (Carol Burnett) and the Wickersham Brothers - a tribe of rampaging blue simians who stand as Dr. Seuss's most inspired vision of mob-think - the animals come after the elephant with a vengeance, bent on immolating the speck in a vat of boiling Beezlenut oil. Apply the political witch-hunt parallels as you see fit.
"Horton Hears a Who!" represents a fresh, and mostly refreshing, approach in Hollywood's pillaging of the good doctor's oeuvre. Gone are the A-list stars in eye-sore make-up of Universal's live-action "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" (2000) and "The Cat in the Hat" (2003). Gone, too, is the witless vulgarity of a PG-rated Seuss flick desperate to pander to middle schoolers and teenagers.
Apparently as appalled by those films as the rest of us, Audrey Geisel (the author's widow) and her lawyers have handed over the new film to Fox Animation head Christopher Meledandri, who understands that a Seuss movie doesn't have to be hip to work. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Working with Blue Sky Animation ("Ice Age"), Meledandri and directors Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino have cooked up a visually luscious CGI jungle for their mop-topped critters to galumph around in. The trees have three-dimensional depth but they're recognizably Seussian in surrealist geometry; the animals mimic the author's sense of line and whimsy, with a dash of oddball hyper-cuteness derived from Japanese anime.
Even Whoville feels right: all loopy buildings and impossible kiddie-Escher staircases. There's a sequence involving a visit to the Whoville Observatory that's breathtakingly graceful - a fusion of Rube Goldberg, Wile E. Coyote, and Alexander Calder.
At the same time, "Horton" strains to fit in with all the other family "product" cluttering our multiplexes, DVD players, and landfills. The Whoville sequences have been turned into wham-bam slapstick, the vulture (Will Arnett) is now a scary villain with a Russian accent, and the less said the better about the Mayor's "sassy" black secretary (Niecy Nash; Wanda Sykes must have been busy doing Applebee's ads).
As if "I meant what I said and I said what I meant, an elephant's faithful, one hundred percent" (borrowed from "Horton Hatches the Egg") isn't enough, an extra feel-good message has been tacked on in the form of the Mayor's misunderstood son, Jo-jo, who's mostly silent, a la Paul Dano in "Little Miss Sunshine," but who eventually - well, let's just say he's voiced by teen singing heartthrob Jesse McCartney for a reason. Score one for the soundtrack CD.
Carrey can't always keep the smarmy pop-culture cross-references in check ("I love the smell of bananas in the morning," oy), and these deliver the expected easy laughs while betraying the essential simplicity of Dr. Seuss. Yet the overall tone is playful rather than forced, and even when "Horton" takes a side-alley into an anime action parody, I found myself laughing against my better judgment.
It's a tough balancing act and probably a futile one. As greedily as Hollywood looks upon these books as a franchise to strip-mine, the hard fact remains that what's good about them - Ted Geisel's untrendy gentleness, humor, and intelligence - resists translation to the big screen.
Which won't stop the studios from trying, obviously. At least "Horton Hears a Who!" understands that this story's moral - "A person's a person, no matter how small" - applies to the customers in the booster seats.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.
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