Film review: Horton Hears a Who

Horton Hears a Who @ IMDB

Now, when I was a kid, hand drawn animation was king

Well, to be fair, Disney was all but dead on it's feet, cartoons on TV were being shopped out to cheap Far East animation houses to churn out 30 minute toy adverts and hardly anyone was putting out any animated feature films.

Then a couple of things happened: The Little Mermaid (which revitalized Disney and animated features in general) and Toy Story (which proved that 3D animation could work in the cinema).

So had a lot of studios looking at the success Disney was having with Mermaid, Aladdin, Lion King etc and set up their own animation houses but when Toy Story came along heads were turned again. It was a combination of animated kids films being again critically and (more importantly) commercially successful plus a new medium that wasn't as labour intensive as hand drawn animation.

This short recap is why we have had the glut of 3D films over the last few years which brings us to Horton Hears a Who.

Based on the story by Dr Seuss, it is about Horton the elephant who finds a spec upon which is an entire world, lived in the Whos.

Dr Seuss hasn't had a great time of it in recent times in the cinema. We've had the two live action adaptations, How The Grinch Stole Christmas and The Cat in The Hat. Both far from ideal. Why?

Simple. The worlds created in the films looked...flat. The artwork is the Suess stories is wildly surreal which is never quite carried off in the previous films.

This film, however, nails the look of the books perfect. It is for reasons like this that 3D animation proves why it has grown to dominate the animated world. The scope of movement and design is fantastic. But, the problem with all these 3D animated films is that they just don't try. Whilst Pixar is out there really pushing what you can do in an animated film for kids, most just don't bother. They get the cute animals, a few throwaway references for the adults watching, wrap it up in a mice moral package and there you go.

Which is what Horton suffers from. It's not bad: it bounds along, some of the set pieces are funny, it looks great, the message is delivered nicely (if repeatedly) but it just doesn't get to the heights of a Pixar film.

But again, this is not aimed at me and my son loved it. And the monkeys were really funny but then monkeys always are.

In a word? Pleasant.