Information taken from Brandon Gray's
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/chart/ 14 11 Horton Hears a Who $605,347 -54.7% 770 -693 $786 $150,699,120
88 75 Persepolis $5,606 -43.4% 15 -12 $373 $4,435,405
131 110 Chicago 10 $331 -83.5% 4 -4 $82 $170,198
The last time I had enough time to post this, I had just seen "Horton
Hears a Who". It was O.K. I thought the visuals for Horton's jungle had an
appealing design; they managed to translate the jungle to a CGI format
believably. Some premises they brought to the movie worked for me. They could
use the Whos' unconcern about night suddenly turning to day and other strange
occurances to satirize being apathetic about the world around you. Horton
seemed to be some teacher for the younger animals, and had a strong curiousity
about the world around him, which fits the plot of him caring about Whoville
once he found it. So I found the movie entertaining enough to watch.
There IS the kind of filler that made us groan whenever we watched the
trailer. The mayor's boy is completely uninteresting. His motivations for not
talking, or his true passion, they didn't impress me all that much (and c'mon,
a who with a "Goth" look?) Every now and then, they let Carrey burst into a
Robin Williams spiel. And man, I thought NO ONE listened to REO Speedwagon
anymore. (Speaking of which, the very abrupt ending left me really
unsatisfied.) My point, though, is that these groaner moments don't happen
nearly as often as you'd expect from the trailer. I'm thankful.
Bizarrely enough, the movie has two scenes in traditional animation. They
leave me feeling wistful: "Horton Hears a Who" still looks a lot more
appealing in a traditional animation. Unfortunately they wasted one of these
traditional animation scenes on an astonishing fighting-anime parody. Say
what??
- Juan F. Lara