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Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who!
Jim Carrey, Steve Carell
I like nonsense. It wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. It's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities. – Dr. Seuss
You might have heard of the children’s books “Heather Has Two Mommies,” “Gloria Goes to Gay Pride,” and “Belinda's Bouquet.” Nothing seems to be more Christian than teaching tolerance and love. Watch Focus On The Family’s heads spin if someone pulls out "The Sissy Duckling." I guess that darn duck should just stuff every “sissy” feeling into a vault of self-hatred and loathing until he has a Mrs. Duck that blames herself for him not being attracted to her and some little ducklings to slap around after polishing off a bottle of Gray Goose. Nothing like promoting the uses of Mary Jane among the nursery set with “It’s Just A Plant.” Newbery Medal winner “The Higher Power of Lucky” has been banned in a countless libraries across the United States because of one technical word. Yet, it is rare that a children’s book gets involved in one, let alone two, political controversies. That is exactly what “Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who!” did. How could a story about an Elephant in the Jungle of Nool and tiny planet with microscopic inhabitants known as Whos cause one let alone two controversies twenty-five years apart?
Theodor Seuss Geisel, over the course of his life, wrote 44 children’s books. All of which remain in print to this day. Along with Dr. Benjamin Spock, he is one of the two most influential individuals on how children are raised in this country in the latter half of the 20th century. Before Geisel, most famous for the “Cat In The Hat,” “Green Eggs And Ham” and “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas,” came rolling around, children’s literature had to have religious and moral overtones. His first book was rejected by 27 different publishers because it had “no moral or message” and was incapable of “transforming children into good citizens.” What early publishers and readers did not recognize in Seuss’s nonsensical stories with their catchy rhythms was the good doctor was offering a moral vision that challenged the status quo of what it meant to be a child. He was communicating, not just how children should behave, but what kind of world they should want to live in and to achieve this world often meant not being a “good citizen.” He preached against fascism, racism, the arms race, unrestricted capitalism, and destruction of the environment. Conservative parents reading his books to their children often did not recognize that he was critiquing their very way of life, subverting many of the moral messages they were trying to communicate to their children, replacing them with a more liberal view of the world and childhood.
In the early 1950s, Seuss was concerned about two things, the growing threat of nuclear war and the McCarthy hearings. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin on the earlier Tydings Committee, a subcommittee of Senate Foreign Relations Committee and later as the chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations held what was basically a witch hunt to root out communism in the United States. Many innocent lives were ruined in the process and careers destroyed. At the same time, less than nine years after a nuclear bomb had been dropped first on the city of Hiroshima and then a second one dropped on Nagasaki to end World War II, several other countries had entered the nuclear bomb club. Russian tested their bomb on August 29, 1949 and they were soon followed by Great Britain. Rumors of other countries like France and China were working on their own nuclear capacity. It was in this climate that Dr. Seuss wrote Horton Hears a Who!
Taking the gentle elephant character named Horton, he had created in 1940, who had gone out of his way to protect a bird’s egg, Seuss had a new tale in mind. He conceived of a microscopic city called Who-ville filled with creatures named Whos that existed on a speck of dust that he would come back to again in “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” The story was simple, Horton the Elephant is out walking through the Jungle of Nool on the fifteenth of May when he hears a small speck of dust talking to him. This speck of dust is really a small planet where a race called the Whos live. Although Horton cannot see them, his large ears provide him the ability to hear them. He agrees to protect them because “a person’s a person, no matter how small.” The other animals in the jungle ridicule him and even try to kill him because he is protecting this piece of dust. The villains of the story are the Wickersham Brothers and Sour Kangaroo who get bent out of shape by Horton’s peaceful ways. The elephant in order to save the piece of dust, lest they be turned into beezlenut stew by the villains, tells the Whos that they must let the larger jungle know that they are real. In order to be heard all the Whos in one voice cry out but they are not heard until the smallest Who, Jo-Jo, joins in the chorus because “a person’s a person no matter how small.” The Wickersham Brothers clearly represented Joseph McCarthy as much of their words mimicked the Senator’s more famous utterances.
Yet, there was one little thing that Theodor Geisel did not count on. Many of the children who grew up on his stories decided to appropriate his words for their conservative political cause. The elderly children’s book author turned on the television one day and found his words “a person’s a person, no matter how small” on t-shirts worn by pro-life groups. The American Life League and other pro-life groups adopted it as their mission statement, stamping it on pamphlets and letterheads. Seuss, a lifelong liberal, sent several letters out asking various groups to stop using his words and threatening legal action if they did not. After her husband’s death, Audrey Geisel followed through on her husband’s feelings by suing one group to stop using that phrase.
Horton Hears a Who! was adapted into a half-hour animated television special in 1970 by Chuck Jones and provides the backbone of the 2000 Broadway musical Seussical, but is there enough material for a movie? The other two efforts to turn a Seuss children’s book into a feature length film, How the Grinch Stole Christmas and The Cat In The Hat, ended as cinematic nightmares for children. Hollywood heavyweights Jim Carrey, Dane Cook, Steve Carell, Jaime Presley, Seth Rogan, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Mr. Eko in Lost), Carol Burnett, and Will Arnett (Gob in Arrested Development) are on board this CGI project. Well, I can say it is the best of the three Seuss stories brought to the big screen. It is not a movie series in Shrek’s league quality wise, but is a nice enough movie and will not bore parents out of their gourd. It should be the biggest money maker in the first quarter of 2008. You don’t have to be Horton to hear what is coming next, a sequel. Horton Hatches An Egg should be hitting theaters in 2009 or 2010 and you can almost predict that Seussical the musical will be out soon afterwards.
Verdict: A Very Good adaptation of a Seuss Story