Victoria's Secret Fashion
Your hunting photos
.JPG)
Samuel L. Jackson honored
News-Sun cartoonist channels Seuss for 'Horton'
Related: See Catrow's drawingsThursday, March 13, 2008
SPRINGFIELD — David Catrow remembers lying in bed with chickenpox and reading "The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins" and "The Cat in the Hat."
Decades later, at the request of 20th Century Fox, he had to flip back to those sorts of memories.
Extras
Photos
With his concept drawings for 'Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who,' David Catrow played with expressions for Horton. By his own estimate, he did hundreds of drawings for the new movie.
Catrow's concept for the mayor of Who-ville.
One of Catrow's concepts for Whos.
A Catrow concept for a Who-ville gadget — a Who-ville bomb shelter."I was able to meander my way through my life and wind up at the place I started," he said.
And because you can't get chickenpox twice, it was back to Seuss for Catrow.
The longtime editorial cartoonist for the Springfield News-Sun helped create the look of "Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who," an animated version of the 1954 Seuss classic that hits theaters Friday, March 14.
Clear back in 2005, before the movie even had a script, Catrow was called on by Fox to draw concept art.
It was his job to take a beloved, but relatively short, children's book and go beyond what Dr. Seuss originally drew.
Basically, Fox's Blue Sky Studios — the same studio responsible for the "Ice Age" movies — needed enough art to fill an 86-minute movie.
So Catrow, who's illustrated more than 60 children's books of his own, played with expressions for Horton the elephant (voiced in the movie by Jim Carrey).
He also fleshed out the inhabitants of Who-ville, that dusty little city on the clover, and its mayor (voiced by Steve Carell).
And he thought up creatures for the jungle of Nool.
That's just to start.
A year later, his drawings numbered in the hundreds.
"If you bundled them all up and dropped them," he explained, "you'd probably break a couple of toes."
Catrow, who joined the News-Sun in 1984, was picked for the job by Steve Martino, one of the film's two directors. (And, as it turns out, a native of nearby Kettering.)
"I've been a big fan of Dave's work. I tend to follow children's picture books," Martino said. "His ability to capture fun characters is the thing I was attracted to."
Out of all the available illustrators, Catrow seemed best suited to capture the spirit of the late Theodor Seuss Geisel.
He's credited with visual development on the film.
"Dave did so much of that early work — finding the look of the mayor, finding the look of the city council," Martino said. "He gave us fun ideas for the environment as well."
What drawings of his didn't directly make the film were used to inspire the animators and even the writers, who threw some of his Seussian gadgets into the story.
"I was put in a position where I had to think, 'How would Dr. Seuss do this?' " said Catrow, whose book "Plantzilla" is close to being developed into an animated TV series.
For Catrow, it was an opportunity to commune with his biggest influence.
"There was nothing he couldn't express," Catrow said. "It was so off the wall, and that's what appealed to me.
"It felt kind of funny to try to imagine how he'd do it."
Catrow apparently nailed it.
In an attempt to win approval for the film, his art was shown to Seuss' widow, Audrey Geisel.
"Dr. Seuss was very protective of his stuff," Catrow said. "When he died, all of a sudden all these properties came available and it became a feeding frenzy."
As president of Dr. Seuss Enterprises, you can't blame Mrs. Geisel for now approaching new requests like they were made of green eggs and ham.
The previous two big-screen shots at Dr. Seuss material — "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" in 2000 and "The Cat in the Hat" in 2003 — stunk worse than a rotten red fish, blue fish.
Obviously, though, she gave her blessing to the digitally animated "Horton."
Catrow thinks he knows why.
"It looks like Seuss, but it's not," he said. "But it still has the feel of Seuss."
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0352 or amcginn@coxohio.com.
