Horton Hears a Who! (2008 film)

Horton the Elephant struggles to protect a microscopic community from his neighbors who refuse to believe it exists.
Horton Hears a Who! (also known as Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who! or simply Horton) is a 2008 American animated adventure comedy film based on the 1954 book of the same name by Dr. Seuss, produced by Blue Sky Studios and distributed by 20th Century Fox. The film was directed by Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino (in their feature directorial debuts), from a screenplay written by the writing team of Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio. It stars the voices of Jim Carrey and Steve Carell as Horton the Elephant and Mayor Ned McDodd, respectively, alongside Carol Burnett, Will Arnett, Seth Rogen, Dan Fogler, Isla Fisher, Jonah Hill, and Amy Poehler. Recurring Blue Sky collaborator John Powell composed the film's musical score. It is the fourth screen adaptation of the book following the 1970 Chuck Jones television special, the 1987 Soviet animated short, and the 1992 Russian animated short.
The film was released theatrically on March 14, 2008, to generally positive reviews, and grossed $299 million on a budget of $85 million. Horton Hears a Who! was the third Dr. Seuss feature film adaptation, the first adaptation to be fully animated using CGI technology, the first and so far only theatrical film adaptation to receive positive reviews, and the second Dr. Seuss film starring Jim Carrey after How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000).
== Plot ==
On the 15th of May in the Jungle of Nool, Horton the Elephant, the jungle's eccentric nature teacher, hears a tiny yelp coming from a floating dust speck and gives chase to it before placing it on top of a pink clover. Horton finds out the speck harbors the city of Whoville and its inhabitants, the Whos, led by Mayor Ned McDodd, whose family includes his wife, Sally; 96 daughters whose names all begin with the letter H; and one son, JoJo. Despite being the oldest child and next in line for the mayoral position, JoJo does not want to be the next mayor, and he does not speak due to his fear of disappointing his father.
Once Horton begins carrying the speck with him, the city starts experiencing strange phenomena, like earthquakes and different changes in the weather, and the mayor finds his attempts to caution Whoville challenged by the town council, led by the opportunistic yet condescending chairman.
After he makes contact with Horton, the mayor finds out from local scientist Dr. Mary Lou LaRue that Whoville will be destroyed if Horton does not find a safer home. With the help of his best friend Morton the mouse, Horton decides to place the speck atop Mt. Nool, the safest place in the jungle. The head of the jungle, the Sour Kangaroo, who refuses to believe that the Whos exist, demands numerous times that Horton give up the speck as she believes he's overshadowing her authority, but Horton refuses. Also taking force toward Horton are the Wickersham Brothers, a group of monkeys who like to cause havoc around the jungle. Eventually, the Kangaroo enlists a sinister but idiotic vulture named Vlad Vladikoff to get rid of the speck by force. He initially only agrees to do it in exchange for the Kangaroo's son Rudy, but when she threatens to hire the Wickersham Brothers to do it as she will probably change her mind, he eventually decides to do it for free.
Vlad makes many attempts to steal the clover, but Horton outruns him. In a last attempt to steal it, Vlad manages to steal the clover away from Horton and drops it into a massive field of identical pink clovers causing a large tremor in Whoville. After unsuccessfully picking 2,999,999 clovers, Horton eventually recovers the clover (exactly the 3,000,000th clover), also revealing himself to the rest of Whoville. The Kangaroo eventually finds out that Horton still has the speck, fires Vlad and rallies the jungle community into an angry mob, preying on their fears that their own children will become chaotic delinquents under Horton's influence.
Upon surrounding him, the Kangaroo offers Horton a final chance to renounce Whoville's existence. Horton refuses, and despite the heartfelt speech that he gives, the Kangaroo orders the animals to rope and cage him, and to boil the speck and Whoville in a cauldron of beezlenut oil. The Mayor enlists all of his people to make noise to prove the animals that they really exist, assisted by JoJo's "Symphonophone", an invention that creates a huge musical contribution and reveals that JoJo's "true" passion is music but still fails to penetrate the surface of the speck.
The Kangaroo snatches the clover from the captured Horton and prepares to drop it into the cauldron. Meanwhile, in the nick of time, JoJo grabs the horn that was used to project Horton's voice, rushes to the highest tower, and yells out "Yopp!", breaking through the sound barrier just seconds before the speck hits the oil. Rudy grabs the clover and proclaims he hears it, and the other animals of Nool notice that they hear it too. Despite his mother's objections, Rudy returns the clover to the released Horton, while the animals, realizing the truth about the Whos' existence, turn on the Kangaroo for deceiving them. While being praised for his integrity by his neighbors, Horton forgives the now-remorseful Kangaroo, who befriends him with a makeshift umbrella for Whoville. It is revealed that the Jungle of Nool (and Earth as a whole) is just one speck, like Whoville, among numerous others, floating in space.
== Production ==
After the critical and commercial failure of the 2003 film The Cat in the Hat, Dr. Seuss' widow, Audrey Geisel, was so dissatisfied with the film that she then decided not to allow any more live-action feature films based on his work. In March 2005, as Blue Sky Studios was completing Robots, the studio and 20th Century Fox Animation president Chris Meledandri approached Geisel about getting the adaptation rights for Horton Hears a Who!. The art director for Robots, Steve Martino, along with story consultant and additional scene director Jimmy Hayward, created a model of protagonist Horton and some animation tests to showcase their design ideas to Geisel, who eventually agreed on "a seven-figure deal" for both the book and its predecessor Horton Hatches the Egg. Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio were then hired to write the script, to be directed by Hayward and Martino with a set release date of early 2008.
Geisel was credited as a supervising producer and watched production up close, and also gave the directors full access to her late husband's archives, including his original sketches, 3-D sculptures, work done for the film The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. (1953), and even memos Dr. Seuss traded with Chuck Jones during the production of the Grinch TV special. For references in doing the character animation, along with footage of the voice actors performing their lines, the Blue Sky animators recorded themselves performing the script in an "acting room" to see what of their body language could translate well into the film.
To make Horton different from the mammoths Blue Sky worked with in the Ice Age series, he would at times able to stand and walk upright and bipedally on two legs making him somewhat bipedal, in a way that made him look like "a fat man in an elephant suit" as they decided to give him bipedalism in order to make him do so. While the design had a major difference from the original book, with a bigger mouth to allow for wider facial expressions like those of Jim Carrey, as the directors noticed Horton's design in the book varied according to his emotion, the 3D wireframe tried to allow for the same effects.
== Release ==
Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who! was released on DVD and Blu-ray on December 9, 2008. Three versions of the DVD are available: a single-disc edition, a 2-disc special edition, and a gift set packaged with a Horton plush. All three versions included the Ice Age short film Surviving Sid.
In the United States, the film earned $77,630,768 from DVD sales and $180,434 from Blu-ray sales for a total of $77,811,202 in video sales.
The film was released on Chace+ on January 1, 2021.
== Trivia ==
* After the snow falls in Whoville, the children can be seen building a "Grinch" snowman.
* Jim Carrey's second movie based on a Dr. Seuss story. The first was How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000). Both stories have Whos in them, as well as the town of Whoville.
* The first Dr. Seuss adaptation fully animated using CGI technology.
* Some of the trees seen in the movie resemble Truffula Trees from another Dr. Seuss story, "The Lorax".
* The Mayor receives a goldfish in a fishbowl from a Who who looks remarkably like the Cat In The Hat (he is only seen twice, briefly - once from behind, and later from a distance - and his hat has blue stripes instead of red). Later, just before the first attack by Vlad, the Mayor is resuscitating the fish. When the fish lands back in his bowl, he leans on the side of the bowl just like the goldfish in The Cat In The Hat.
* Green eggs (from Dr. Seuss' "Green Eggs and Ham") are briefly seen during The Mayor and his 97 kids' breakfast.
* A Who bearing a striking resemblance to the Cat in the Hat can be seen, except he's yellow with a blue-striped hat.
* The third Blue Sky Studios film to feature no humans and to be composed by John Powell after Robots (2005) and Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006).
* This is the first Blue Sky Studios film to be rated G by the MPAA. All of that company's previous films were rated PG.
* The only computer animated film based on a Dr. Seuss book not produced by Illumination, as they would produce the future films The Lorax (2012), The Grinch (2018), and The Cat in the Hat, not counting Green Eggs and Ham (from Sony Animation).
* It is the first Dr. Seuss movie that is made by a company other than Universal Pictures, and Warner Bros.
* Even though Jim Carrey was 20th Century Fox's first choice for the role of Horton the Elephant, Blue Sky Studios recommended they offer the role to Eddie Murphy first as they highly enjoyed his voice acting performance in the Shrek trilogy at the time. 20th Century Fox agreed to their recommendation and offered the role to Murphy; however, Murphy turned down the role after reading the script because he wasn't too interested in the project and he couldn't connect to the character. After Murphy said no, 20th Century Fox then offered the role to Jim Carrey, to which he said yes and was cast in the role.
=== References or Mentions in CHACE! Media ===
TBD
=== References from CHACE! Media ===
TBD
=== Animals of The Jungle of Nool ===
Other animals that appear as residents of The Jungle of Nool are Deer Whose-horns-are-connected-from-one-to-the-other from If I Ran the Zoo, Zatz-its from On Beyond Zebra!, Long-Legger Kwongs and Ruffle-Necked Sala-ma-gooxes from Scrambled Eggs Super!, other yaks (which resembled the Yawning Yellow Yak from Dr. Seuss's ABC), other bears (which like Tommy and his father Willie and unlike regular bears have cow/hippo-like snout-shaped muzzles and tiger-like stripes), Zongs (anteater-like creatures which resemble walking vacuum cleaners) from Oh, the Thinks You Can Think!, and lizard-like creatures (which have bird-like beak-shaped snouts), which were designed by Jason Sadler, a former animator, storyboard artist, designer, and voice actor on Dick Figures, who also works for Blue Sky Studios as a character designer, and was also famous for Happy Tree Friends as an animator, storyboard artist, director, and writer. He would later work as a character designer for Rio.
== Gallery ==
Horton Hears a Who! (film)/Gallery
Category:2008
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