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Horton Hears a Who! Movie Review

Horton Hears a Who! is a 2008 animated family adventure film directed by Steve Martino and starring Jim Carrey. It’s one of Blue Sky Studios’ best features.

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“A person’s a person,

no matter how small“

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Released in 2008 to excellent box office and very strong reviews, this flick’s reputation isn’t all that great despite its excellence on many fronts, which makes it rather underrated today. It’s clearly one of the studio’s greatest films, at least in the top three, so it needs more attention nowadays.

Horton, an elephant, must dodge his pesky neighbors and find a safe place to keep the dust speck, which contains a microscopic community of creatures known as The Whos. Based on the famous Dr. Seuss book, this just might be one of the best adaptations of his works to date, certainly up there with the recent Netflix series ‘Green Eggs and Ham’.

It’s a lovely story with a beautiful message about respecting all creatures, no matter their size. It was a fantastic choice to introduce children to the concept of size, microscopic communities and all different life on Earth, and how small we are compared to the planet and the universe. That ending was powerful in making that connection between the universe and people as well as people and these microscopic creatures.

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The storytelling in this movie is mostly terrific. I did appreciate that it stayed true to the spirit of Dr. Seuss in both the styling and the tone. The messaging, themes and the overall premise and narrative are fantastic, but the pace of the movie did feel a bit too brisk while excessive action scenes in certain sections made the movie overly modern, which is exactly the problem that almost all Blue Sky movies share.

But my main issue with the film and the one thing that keeps it from being truly great is the casting. I despise modern animation movies using regular actors and celebrities instead of voice actors, and here we’ve got one of the worst examples of that. Jim Carrey as Horton was a terrible choice while Steve Carell and Seth Rogen are particularly recognizable in supporting roles. It’s distracting and this habit should die off as true trained voice actors should be the only legitimate choice for these movies.

With that being said, I still appreciated the strong characterization at display here. Most of the characters worked despite a lot of them getting rather small runtime, but they did make an impact on the story itself. Horton is wonderful, very endearing and a great Dr. Seuss protagonist in heart and soul. The mayor is another great character and the whole eccentric family of his was very enjoyable and fun. Vlad is a Russian stereotype unfortunately, but Morton the mouse was quite memorable as was the kangaroo that was the catalyst for a lot of the story in certain points.

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The animation in Horton Hears a Who! is wonderful! This is exactly how all of these adaptations should look as the characters’ designs are fantastic and faithful to the spirit of his books while the colorful nature of the movie made it very charming to watch, especially for children. The dialogue is very good with some amazing lines full of wisdom while the score, directing and world building are all quite strong.