Preview only show first 10 pages with watermark. For full document please download

Jim Carrey May Be A Veteran

   EMBED


Share

Transcript

“If you give a kid a character that he’s never seen before, in a world that he’s never seen before, they will completely lose themselves in an imaginary space. At the same time they are getting all of those wonderful lessons.” - Jim Carrey 3 entertainment 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. To apply those wings to the first computer-animated Seuss feature, the writer-illustrator’s widow, Audrey Geisel, turned to Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino. Making their feature-length directing debut together, the pair, who both worked previously on “Robots,” vowed to retain all of the book’s story and as much of Seuss’ distinctive, wacky look as possible. “We were unusually concerned with it,” Hayward notes. “Our No. 1 priority was to get that right.”This was both a simple and massive undertaking. In his usual playful verse, Seuss (real name: Theodor Seuss Geisel) wrote a short tale about an elephant named Horton, whose 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, Steve Carell as the Mayor of Who-Ville T Jim Carrey as Horton he classic 1954 Dr. Seuss tale Horton Hears a Who makes its way to the big screen with the help of two A-list celebs who voice the lead roles in the animated family film. Jim Carrey voices Horton, the elephant who shares his creative ideas with neighboring kids of the jungle and is loved by all until he goes to great lengths to hide a spec of dust from others after he hears a faint cry for help from the world of Who-ville. Question talked to Carrey and his co-star Steve Carell, who plays the mayor of Who-ville desperate to save his people from the eminent destruction that will happen if Horton can’t protect them. Q: How does “Horton” transcend a story for young people? Carell: Wow. How does it transcend? You are being very heady right off the bat. You just think about how it resonates, however much anything resonates in a five or six-year-old. This is a book that I think resonates with kids. They don’t understand the metaphors or the richness to it, but at the same time it resonates. There is something very specific about the theme that I think even a little kid can understand. That is that everyone deserves an equal footing in life. I think that’s just a very basic tenant of being a creature of the world. Carrey: That was a real good answer. Carell: Then say the same thing. John Smith Staff Writer Carrey: I think, as far as kids go, the thing that attracts them to this is not the deeper concepts involved. It’s really just the fact that Seuss’s creativity was so incredible. He was such an original. If you give a kid a character that he’s never seen before, in a world that he’s never seen before, they will completely lose themselves in an imaginary space. At the same time they are getting all of those wonderful lessons. In my own personal experience, I just looked at it and I’ve always been drawn to things that are different. I felt odd anyway, as a child, so anything odd I went, “Oh, those are my people.” I dig those people. Myself, I listened to them on tape so I didn’t really see the pictures. Carol Burnett as Kangaroo Seth Rogen as Morton entertainment 4 A proud Mayor of Who-Ville. If I ran the circus, the gang that made the sturdy, witty, inventively animated Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who! would get first dibs on any future movie productions of the Theodor Seuss Geisel canon. Grinches have messed up recent live-action adaptations beyond repair: I do not like The Cat in the Hat, I do not like it, fancy that. But this exuberant translation of the 1954 classic ‚Äî from the Blue Sky Studios folks who made Sisyphean drama out of a squirrel and a nut in Ice Age ‚Äî is true to the Seuss vision, with a contemporary integrity that makes full use of CG power without sacrificing the delicacy of the author’s springy, zingy illustrations. The new Horton proves that in the care of a creative team prudent enough to keep the focus on the book’s timeless lange of eccentricities and wethics and steer clear of meta joking or condescension, there’s new juice to be squeezed from old Seuss yet. Certainly the excesses of the liveaction Cat and How the Grinch Stole Christmas movies can’t eclipse the durable genius of the good Doctor, who, in Horton, has created one of literature’s great pachyderm role models. One day ‘’in the Jungle of Nool,’’ as anyone who was ever an American child may remember, the title elephant hears the tiniest squeak coming from the smallest speck floating through the air, and discerns an entire universe in a dust mote. ville he alone hears ‚Äî city 5 entertainment 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. The book’s plot needed padding for a feature-length film, and Seuss’ sometimes minimalist drawings elaborated upon to fill a movie screen. Steve Carell voices the Mayor of Who-ville, Horton’s contact, who now has 96 daughters and one son and is considered as crazy by his fellow citizens as Horton is by his. The production team also went gleefully into greater detail with Who-ville’s laws-of-physics-defying architecture and contraptions. “I think CG is the way to do Seuss,” says co-director Martino. “The things that he created in his illustrations are what computer animation is great at. We can make it look believable; in other words, we can put a texture on there that makes it look like it would feel like stucco or brass or whatever. “And you don’t have any restrictions. If we want to do a flying staircase, we don’t have to worry about the engineering to support that.” 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.” But another reason to go the fully animated route with “Horton” was, well, he’s an elephant. Can’t really put an actor in a fat suit with a radio-controlled trunk and expect it to work very well. Getting computers to properly animate such a massive beast with parts that move like no real elephant’s was not easy, though. “I felt it would be far more entertaining to have Horton go from a quadruped to a biped,” Hayward says. “That’s really a complicated rigging problem “” to have an elephant be able to go from four legs to two and have that big gut sustain itself. He was an incredibly difficult model to