Horton Hears a Who

While I may not seem like the typical Dr. Suess fan, I've been stuck in Surfside Beach all week and I was up for just about anything to ease the boredom. While I was extremely disappointed with the previous attempts, I think they finally got one right. For those of you who missed the colossal advertising campaign, they picked up some pretty big names for this latest installment, ranging from Jim Carry to Steve Carell. As a diehard fan of 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and Superbad, it was pretty great to hear Rogen and Hill voice-acting for a children's animated movie too.

The movie actually stayed pretty true to the book, as far as I can remember. Everyone knows the premise- an elephant finds a colony of Who people living on a flower he found, and can hear them speaking to him because of his gigantic ears. When he tells others about the Who world, they think he's crazy, and so begins the hectic battle between Kangaroo (voiced by a surprisingly menacing Carol Burnett) and Horton regarding the Who's existence. Vlad Vladikoff, the overly soviet vulture nemesis, is hired to ensure the flower is destroyed. Many people believe the original book actually delivered a pro-life, anti-abortion moral ("A person's a person no matter how small"), but the movie itself downplays that element.

The animation is fluid, detailed, and impressive. At one point they stray into traditional animation when Horton bursts intro a psuedo-Dragonball anime cut scene in which he battles hordes of killer monkeys, bringing a little variety to a somewhat-overused medium. While the movie obviously caters to a younger audience, it seems like it defies the trend in that most any age group can be entertained by the brand of humor it adopts.