ON CIRCUIT: The lovely kids’ animation flick Horton Hears a Who!, as well as The Nanny Diaries and Walk Hard.
Horton Hears a Who!
The people behind Ice Age have done a lovely job of animating the elasticated world of Dr Seuss. Jim Carrey provides the voice of the lolloping elephant Horton who discovers a city on a speck of dirt and becomes its protector, reasoning that ‘a person’s a person, no matter how small”. It’s a charmingly dopey creation (though, creepily, the animators have given the elephant Carrey’s tombstone-tooth grin) and the anarchic mini-city, Who-Ville, is giddily madcap.
But Seuss’s story takes about 10 minutes to read, and there’s the rub: where to go with the remaining 70 minutes. In places, the add-ins are properly barmy — best of all when Who-Ville’s hand-wringing mayor (Steve Carrell) gets jabbed in the arm with anaesthetic by the dentist. Elsewhere, it’s drearily conventional. Watch the dumpy elephant cross a rickety rope bridge. Will it break? What do you think? But kids won’t let that stop them. — Cath Clarke