About two-thirds of the way through Blue Sky Studios' Horton Hears a Who, JoJo, the young son of the mayor of Whoville, escapes from his bedroom window and heads for the town's abandoned observatory. To get there he must swing out on a mobile-supported bucket across a gaping chasm and then shoot himself skyward on a large, rubber-band catapult; the latter lofts him to exactly the right height so he can step easily onto the lowest step of the staircase that winds to the top of the observatory's steep peak.
 This sequence could have been fast and frenetic, with a lot of hollering and flapping of limbs and lips. Instead, it's done with ease and grace. For a moment, at least, the filmmakers are content to sit back at a distance and watch young JoJo effortlessly work the fantastical, Seussian machinery, and JoJo himself takes it all in stride the way you or I would take an escalator. This scene, which takes probably no more than thirty or forty-five seconds to unfold, is the best thing in the movie, and a reminder of what Horton Hears a Who could have been: an airy and imaginative plunge into a world of odd contraptions and cheerful personalities, told without frivolous ostentation or bombastic slapstick.
Instead, it gives us Jim Carrey. For an hour and a half.
Now, Jim Carrey has his fans (though I am not among them), and his appeal seems to derive from a skin-busting energy and an endearing willingness to do anything—but anything—for a laugh. But rubber needs a hard surface to bounce off, and Carrey's humor is in his physical presence, not his voice, which makes his performance as an animated Horton, the Who-Hearing Elephant, at best redundant and at worst assaulting. He brays, he minces, he prattles, he mugs, and you can easily picture the actor himself in the recording studio doing outrageous things with his hands and hindquarters. But it never adds up to a personality, and the animators, who put Horton himself though a very Carreyesque regimen of smirks and eye pops, don't supply the deficiency. There is no pulse, no timing, no rhythm to Horton's ebullience—just a lot of jangling motion.
Actually—and fortunately—Horton is not constantly onscreen, and the movie spends at least as much time in the tiny city of Whoville as it does in Horton's jungle. There, the comedic chores are assumed by Steve Carell as the city's mayor. Carell is new to me, but, as with Carrey, I see little to suggest that his comic talent lies in the subtleties of his vocal inflections. It is not his fault that he hasn't a very robust set of pipes—and few of the celebrities hired by the non-Pixar studios as voice actors have any character in their cadences—but, like Carrey, Carell tries making up for it with a lot of shrieking, and the animators follow suit with too much limb flailing and too many "wacky" facial expressions. Of course, there is nothing wrong with such things in animation—you want and expect as much in a cartoon—but the filmmakers don't really know how to space and hold and time what they've given us. The results are not entertaining; after awhile, in fact, they are just boring. And once you figure out which clichés are being used—like the use of sudden emotional shifts—it actually becomes predictable.
The sense of tedium is not relieved by the story. The original Dr. Seuss tale is a rather thin, though effective, affair: Horton hears a Who calling from the surface of a dust mote; the other jungle inhabitants, who in the book are more mischievous than malevolent, steal the mote away, and even after Horton recovers it they are intent on destroying it. It's a rather linear tale, and even Chuck Jones's TV adaptation, at twenty minutes, felt padded. This feature movie has to stretch it out almost three times that length. The filmmakers have tried inserting some material of their own: The mayor is given a large family, including a boy (the aforementioned JoJo) who regards him silently with vaguely hooded resentment; and Horton's exertions cause more than one disaster to befall poor Whoville in the course of the story. There is also some vaguely political folderol mixed in—the "sour kangaroo" worries that Horton's fancies are corrupting the jungle children, and the mayor of Whoville must battle a skeptical city council—but the story is so simple that hardly anyone can take offense at any perceived parallels to the real world.
(Except, perhaps, atheists. It's an odd surprise to find a contemporary movie in which one of the heroes explicitly implores the citizenry to believe in a big, invisible protector in the sky, and in which the chief villain subscribes to the positivist philosophy that only what can be seen, heard, and touched is real.)
 Only a truly awful movie will have no redeeming qualities, and Horton is not truly awful. There's not much to the jungle scenes, but Whoville, in a couple of complex tracking and establishing shots, overflows with wonderfully Seussian details. It's not only that the Whos look exactly like Seussian creatures brought convincingly to life. The baroque and whimsical props—the houses, the vehicles, the musical instruments—have a convincing heft and reality while still possessing a nearly magical eccentricity. You keep wanting the camera to hold still, to let you linger over and take in this riot of invention, and that makes it all the more irritating when it rushes past so it can concentrate on some buffoonish physical comedy.
It's in the quiet moments that you detect the possibilities of a movie that went unmade. The sense of an alternative lingers not just in JoJo's night-time expedition to the observatory, but in the occasions when it lights on his skeptical face. He doesn't do much, and there is hardly any "acting" put upon him. But whoever animated him must have studied the face of a smart but quiet child. JoJo's watchful gaze brims with intelligence and puzzlement, and before long you find yourself wishing that he would strike out on his own, away from his father and Horton and all the rest, and just wander around his wonderfully gimcrack little world, drinking it in and letting us drink it in with him. When JoJo finally speaks, he proves to be as tiresome and conventional as the kids out in the jungle, but for awhile, at least, he lets you dream to yourself of avenues untaken.
At least Horton Hears a Who isn't nearly as knowing and obnoxious as a typical DreamWorks picture (though, Shrek-like, it can't resist ending with a faux-pop-gospel-rock number). Blue Sky's design work is also far more beautiful than what comes out of DreamWorks. But it ultimately suffers the same fate as a DreamWorks picture, turning into a painfully "hip" and "irreverent" and "contemporary" interpretation of what should be a timeless classic. I can't think of a single DreamWorks production that has ever promised anything other than a rather rubbishy lot of audience-pandering. Horton, paradoxically, is thus the more disappointing, for having moments that suggest its creators crept up to the edge of doing something genuinely imaginative, only to be held back by their own insecurities—or the insecurities of their financial backers.
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