Jim Carrey may be a veteran of Dr. Seuss movies — he starred, under tons of heavy makeup, in “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”
But “Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who!” is the shape-shifting actor’s first animated movie. And voicing the beloved children’s book’s gentle elephant was a kind of epiphany for the manically inventive comic.
“The great thing about this is that you’re surrounded by artists who are just as creative, if not more so, than you are. And I love being handled by nerds!” Carrey says. “Just to spew something out and have people put wings on it, it’s incredible.”
Carrey voices an elephant named Horton in the adaptation of the short tale by Theodore Seuss Geisel — Dr. Seuss. Horton’s jungle pals think he has gone nuts when he tells them a speck of dust is speaking to him.
Horton is right; on that speck is the microscopic world of Who-ville, whose inhabitants have no idea that their happy, carefree existence depends on an invisible “sky elephant’s” ability to protect their speck from his conformist, increasingly hostile neighbors.
Steve Carell voices the Mayor of Who-ville, Horton’s contact, who has 96 daughters and one son and is considered as crazy by his fellow citizens as Horton is by his.
Carrey says the usual approach to laying animation voice tracks — reading lines alone in a recording booth for a few hours, every couple of months over a two-or-so-year span — was another deceptively easy-seeming part of the process.
“What they do is, they come to your house and they say, ‘This is going to be the simplest process in the world,’ ” the actor says. “They lie to you, completely lie to you! It is hard work, it’s not as simple as they make it sound. It is half a day here and there; whenever you get a free moment, you’re going in to do it.
“But the fact is, they really don’t have a script. They have an overall idea of where they want to go, but they go, ‘Here’s eight pages; what do you think we should do with it?’ Then you sit in a room and jam, come up with ideas and lines.”
“Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who!” is the first computer-animated Seuss feature. Of the live-action Seuss adaptations we’ve seen so far, “Grinch” was critically drubbed but became very popular, and nobody seemed to care much at all for “The Cat in the Hat.”
“I think CG is the way to do Seuss,” says Steve Martino, who co-directed the film with Jimmy Hayward. “The things that he created in his illustrations are what computer animation is great at. We can make it look believable.”
Some of the movie’s concepts — such as the Whos’ blissful obliviousness to their impending destruction and the jungle animals’ fear of whatever they can’t see, hear or understand — feel like they’ve been inspired by current cultural attitudes. But the directors claim that, obviously or implicitly, the themes already were in the more-than-50-year-old book.
“One of the wonderful things about Dr. Seuss’ work is that he touched on universal themes that were relevant when he wrote this book in 1954 and are, I think, very relevant today,” Martino says. ” … The theme of the book — a person’s a person, no matter how small — really is about not painting people with the broad brush of prejudice and intolerance. It’s a wonderful message.”
As for the story’s more cosmic implications, even the big comedy stars found them humbling.
“I know I’m a speck,” Carrey says. “There’s no question about it. I’m an interesting speck, but I’ve always thought in those terms. How can you look at the sky at night and not feel you’re a speck somewhere?
“I’ve always thought there were worlds within worlds too. Like, somewhere inside a cell on my right arm there is some kind of world happening. People are sitting there, going, ‘Oh, I hope we don’t destroy ourselves!’ “
“That’s why we’re paralyzed,” Carell adds. “Now, after doing this movie, I can hardly move because, essentially, I’m afraid I will be crushing tiny universes wherever I go.”
“It’s Armageddon in my pants right now, I swear to God,” Carrey says.
