Word: hortons
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Seated behind me at a critics' screening of Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who! were a well-known movie reviewer and her date, a young child. At the end the child, audibly in rapture, asked, "Did you love the movie?" "I love that you loved it," was the nicely evasive reply. But the child was persistent. "Will you give it a rave? Will you give it four stars...
...with the kid. I hearted Horton, laughing at the funny parts, welling up at the inspirational bits. For the story concocted in 1954 by children's author Ted Geisel has more than a few messages, all of which resound 54 years later. The book is about belief in what you can't see, fidelity to a cause that others think is ridiculous, and community service to reach an improbable goal. We're all in this together, Seuss says; everyone's important. Or, as Horton puts it: "A person's a person, no matter how small...
...Universes within universes - the interdependency of all living things everywhere - is Geisel's theme in Horton. In the Jungle of Nool something foreign lands on a piece of clover. It's not a spaceship but an entire alien world: the nearly infinitesimal planet of Who-ville. Horton the elephant, his large ears giving him the most acute hearing, detects cries from the clover speck. He can't see the little Whos, but he deduces, believes, knows that sentient creatures are in there; and his caring instinct tells him that they must be protected. He builds a rapport with the tiny...
...Horton is a naturally generous soul; in an earlier Seuss story, Horton Hatches the Egg, he had stolidly perched on an irresponsible bird's egg, and stayed at the job for nearly a year, because he had promised he would. "I meant what I said and I said what I meant: An elephant's faithful one hundred percent." This time, his mission is even more perilous. He must fend off the agnostic scorn of prime jungle bureaucrat Jane Kangaroo and her simian minions the Wickersham brothers. Kangaroo charges a "black-bottomed eagle" to fly the speck to a remote spot...
...book became a handsomely detailed TV perennial directed by Chuck Jones, the Warner Bros. animation genius who had worked with Geisel on the wartime Private Snafu cartoons and, in 1966, brought Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas! to the small screen. This Horton was narrated by another old Geisel colleague, Hans Conried, the actor who had incarnated that pedagogue-demagogue, that piano-teacher torturer, Dr. Terwilliker in Geisel's fantastical live-action film The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. And you shouldn't miss the elephant's first appearance in movies, in the Warners cartoon Horton Hatches...