Horton Hears a Who!: A Review

My daughter has learned to crawl over the last few weeks. Among the many changes that this brings to her parents’ world, I find myself musing about how she sees our home, the people in her life, and the world that we are now both mobile in. After all, when I need to get by her, I can just step over her without any trouble, and when she’s crawling around, we literally tower over her. Her perspective is no doubt different because of her small size, and it amuses me to consider how big our world must seem to her, turning a modest bedroom into a grand playground and a walk around the neighborhood into a trip into the great yonder.

It was with those thoughts swirling around in my head that I saw Horton Hears a Who!, the latest and most successful attempt to adapt Dr. Seuss to the big screen. The story centers on Horton, a gentle spirited elephant making his way through his home jungle. He is a self-appointed teacher, telling his friends about the world around him. His efforts to teach are turned on their head one day when he hears a tiny voice. He figures out that the voice is coming from a tiny speck that has come to rest on a small dandelion. The voice is that of the Mayor of Whoville, a delightful place where life is celebration and bad things never happen. In an amusing connection to the end of Men in Black, Whoville’s residents are entirely oblivious to the reality that their world is but a speck in an entire universe. The connection between the two worlds has never been made until now.

Whoville has a problem. Their life on the dandelion is uncertain, and for all of their spirit of celebration, they need Horton to bring their dandelion to a safe place where their world will be protected from the dangers of Horton’s world. Trying to do this for them, Horton encounters one obstacle after another, driven mainly by the fact that nobody in his world believes him. He’s the only one who can hear the Whos, and as his nemesis the Kangaroo reminds all of them: "If you can't hear, see or feel something, it does not exist.” Skepticism abounds, and it runs the risk of destroying the people Horton is trying to protect.

As Horton fights for the Whos, the mayor encounters similar problems. For a world that has never known things to go wrong, he must convince them that something is quite wrong, and that they need the help of a big voice that none of them can hear. In pursuing their best ends, he must endanger his relationship with his family, his friends, and the grand tradition of his office.

For a movie directed at children, Horton raises fascinating questions that are worth wrestling with at various levels. The film reflects on the need for imagination and wonder, a gift that can lie instinctively within children but that can be lost as we grow older. The Kangaroo, offering a great summary of a secularist perspective, is herself filled with jealousy and envy, and mostly joylessness. It is Horton and those who can live lives of imagination and wonder who experience the richness that life has to offer, especially the richness to see an entire dimension to his world that nobody had ever experienced before. The film is a celebration of imagination, and succeeds in inviting us to join them in their sense of wonder.

Alongside this is Seuss’ signature phrase: “a person's a person, no matter how small,” the tagline for the film that invites reflection through its deceptively simple message. It intrigues me to think about this line, written in the early 50’s, and its easy later co-opting by the pro-life movement. Of course, that kind of political commentary is far beyond Seuss’ intent, but it’s interesting to see the line come back in a 2008 film release, where the political implications would seem to be obvious.

While I expect that this kind of political jockeying is well beyond the filmmakers’ intent, I celebrate the idea and like its connection with Horton’s call to imagination. Just as our need for imagination is a celebration of life, so is our calling to protect the smallest voices. We embrace a life-giving message when we reach for those who can’t speak for themselves, who find their voices drowned out by the loud arguments of politicians or the deceptive ends of agenda-setters. Seuss’ twin values, very much alive here in the film adaptation, are as pressing and present for us today as it was when he first wrote the words.

Horton is not a perfect movie, but I was pleased to see a Seuss adaptation that could sustain the simple and complex nature of his messages without losing itself in the gimmicks that come with converting his books to feature-length films. Whether it’s the nieces that I saw the picture with, or the daughter that I step over to get where I’m going, I realize that Seuss’ messages are worth them knowing about, mostly for the deeper truths that they will point them to as they live in a world that loves to steal imagination and step on the innocent.