Extensive reworking of Blue Sky's character rigging software was required to accommodate the wacky poses of the characters in Horton Hears a Who! Photo credit for all images: Blue Sky Studios.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T (Find Out What It Means)
It is the dream of everyone in the business to animate a property which is a beloved icon. And so it is with Blue Sky’s adaptation of Horton Hears a Who!: a dream of a project, with name recognition, imaginative graphics to elaborate, and a thoroughly wacky world to flesh out.

And those nice folks from Blue Sky get to do it.

So here we are, on that great American sporting event, opening weekend. Jobs are won and careers made, or heads roll based on the outcome.

Because we in the media are so dispassionate and cynical about these things, I felt we needed a source with some first-hand experience in anticipating the very worst of all possible outcomes. That is why we've invited the Grinch to provide some color commentary for us today.

Grinch: I’m off if you toady, that angers a Grinch.
If I had all my druthers, I'd much rather you lynch…

Thank you for being with us today, Mr. Grinch.

It was Fox's animation head, Christopher Meledandri (now heading off to Universal), who first pitched a 3D version of Horton Hears a Who! to Audrey Geisel, wife of the late Theodore Geisel, aka Doctor Seuss. Ms. Geisel was said to be incensed about the mature themes in the 2003 Mike Meyers adaptation of The Cat in the Hat, and extremely reluctant to allow any more adaptations of Seuss books.

That courtship took two years; it took the inclusion of Audrey Geisel as an exec producer to seal the deal. Meledandri famously credits a carving by Blue Sky sculptor Mike De Feo of a pivotal scene from the book as having convinced Ms. Geisel that they had the artistic chops to pull off the 3D adaptation.

Blue Sky co-founder and Ice Age director Chris Wedge, who served as exec producer on the project, recalls the response of the Blue Sky staff when the project was announced: "Finally someone is going to do Seuss right!"

Grinch: He forgot -- in the sixties out there on the telly
Chuck Jones and the Doc did some versions not smelly

The job of bringing the film to the screen fell to Jimmy Hayward, longtime Pixar animator from Toy Story onwards, and Steve Martino, art director on Blue Sky's own Robots. Both directors were raised with the book, and retain vivid memories of how it affected them emotionally when they first heard it. They continued to return to those memories as touchstones for creating the movie.

"The guys worked out the ability to the do the kind of wiggly or loop-d-loop pipe-arm movements that Seuss is known for," says director Steve Martino.

Research
Once they had the property, they had to mold it. After all, Horton Hears a Who! is a slender book, with barely 226 lines of anapestic tetrameter rhyme (the famous da da DUM repeated four times in a line, supposedly inspired by the sound of the engine on an ocean voyage Geisel took). While Meledandri may have trumpeted the three-act form of the book, it still has to last for, say, 88 minutes. This is where other adaptations of Seuss have gotten in trouble: often the creation of character-driven subplots can rend the delicate fabric of heart and whimsy on which the Seuss books are founded.

The first place to start was research.

Horton first appeared in 1940, with the book Horton Hatches an Egg. He became animated for Warner's Merrie Melodies in 1942, directed by Bob Clampett. Animators worked off the book instead of a storyboard, drawing gags into the margins of the text. At 10 minutes, this cartoon was largely faithful to the original.

Grinch: They made Horton a dimwit who lisped but had poise
And that song was all wrong, I can't stand all that noise!

Much has been made of the slender 1954 Seuss volume Horton Hears a Who!, some interpreting it as a denunciation of intolerance during the McCarthy era, others dissecting the story as a plea to end racism. The right to life movement has even tried to appropriate the moral of "a person's a person no matter how small," much to the chagrin of the author.

The first animated version was produced and written by Theodore Geisel himself in 1970, and directed by none other than Chuck Jones. Here, Geisel elaborated his characters in light of ignorant provincialism and the Cold War Communist witch hunts. Giesel himself died in 1991, but demonstrated in his own TV adaptations an awareness of the need to change and update his material.

Clearly there was a rich history here to which attention needed to be paid.

To get to the bottom of things, Hayward and Martino went straight to the source. "We went down to the Geisel library at UCSD," Martino affirms, "and held the original art and studied it. We read all the original manuscripts as he was developing the book. We even read his correspondence with Chuck Jones about when they were making the shorter animated version of Horton."

But this was another era, that of 3D. "The thing I paid closest attention to in studying the art," Martino continues, "were things that [Geisel] had done himself taking his ideas into three dimensions. There were a series of trophy animals that he had created there, like mounted on a plaque. But they're very funny and imaginative Seuss characters with funny-looking antlers or a shaving brush for hair. And that was critical, to observe the transition from a sketch or a pen-and-ink drawing into three dimensions, so I was looking at how he handled texture and color and form."