THE CAT IN THE HAT
**½/**** Image B Sound A- Extras C
directed by Hawley Pratt
THE LORAX
***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras C
directed by Hawley Pratt
PONTOFFEL AND HIS MAGIC PIANO (1980)
Pontoffel Pock, Where Are You?
**/**** Image B- Sound B+ Extras C
directed by Gerard Baldwin
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Adapting for the screen a sensibility as singular as that of Dr. Seuss is a desperately tricky thing. It simply won't do to faithfully transpose the narrative, because narrative is hardly the point: Seuss is about nonsense wit both visual and verbal, and to fit it into a standard teleplay box is to destroy everything that makes his books special and unique. Nevertheless, the urge to bring the madness of Dr. Seuss to life is an understandable one, and so it should come as no surprise that in the Sixties and Seventies, CBS commissioned a series of animated specials designed to do just that.
We all know that the most famous of these, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, succeeded wildly by countering the Seuss program with that of the similarly-inclined animation god Chuck Jones, but the others have more or less mouldered in obscurity, largely due to their relative mediocrity when compared to that cartoon exemplar. Still, all three of the remaining specials–now available for the first time on DVD, thanks to the imminent release of the live-action Cat in the Hat movie–at least do not dishonour their sources, even if they fail to distinguish themselves in other respects.
As The Cat in the Hat is from one of the master's best-loved books, it shouldn't come as a shock that it doesn't entirely live up to the source material. The filmmakers struggle gamely, I'll admit, with the saga of the six-foot feline (voice of Allan Sherman) who amuses and perplexes two children as they wait for their mother to return from the grocery store; sure enough, it renders the visual sensibility of the book with fidelity, taking great care to draw the Cat, Mr. K the fish, and Things One and Two with the same skill and scribbly flair that Seuss demands. Though it's perhaps a little too careful in this regard (it never cuts loose and finds its own voice, à la Grinch), purists will not have their feathers ruffled and casual viewers will find the visuals more than adequate.
But the piece trips over its feet when dealing with things aural, a matter for which there is no Seussian corollary. Reading the book is a fluid thing in which description and speech flow through the same harmonious verbal channel, but the stop/start nature of moving-picture dialogue breaks up the steady rhythm and the obviousness of what is happening renders narration a tad superfluous. Even with the good doctor writing the teleplay, the special never quite gets over this hurdle, and lurches from episode to episode with the elegance of Frankenstein's monster. Further breaking things up are the uninspired songs–five of them, crammed into a mere 26 minutes–which change the moods so constantly that one can never reach firm emotional bedrock. The Cat in the Hat is by no means a disaster, but its footing isn't sure enough to call it a success.
Most of these problems are handled with greater skill in The Lorax, a story that admittedly comes with less baggage and more scope than its famous predecessor. No longer are we forced to improvise in one confined space: the story here is the face-off between the unseen capitalist Once-ler and the eponymous creature, the latter of whom speaks for the truffula trees the former has been turning into all-purpose super-garments called thneeds. It has more of an arc, with the thneed industry taking off to such heights that the Lorax must make constant noise about the displacement of the animals who live in the trees' delicate ecosystem, and it revels in visual excess as the industry becomes so ludicrously complex that it looks like a sinister version of Christmas in Whoville. Aside from licking the technical flaws of The Cat in the Hat, the story itself is surprisingly cogent: combining a rolling narrative with a decidedly environmentalist slant, it might be something to project on bedsheets at your next anti-WTO rally.
Alas, the "bonus" cartoon on the Lorax disc, Pontoffel Pock & His Magic Piano (listed in its credit crawl as Pontoffel Pock, Where Are You?), is not up to even the middling standards of the short subjects discussed above. It's the story of a lonely young man who, after losing a job at the local pickle plant, wishes to "get away from it all"–and whose wish is granted by a fairy with a distinctly Seussian helicopter hat. But while it offers a vaster scope (Pock is given a magic piano that whisks him off to exotic locales), it's a strangely small-feeling affair, lacking the sweeping insanity of the master and leaving no impression as a work in its own right. The drawings are so tight within the 1.33:1 ratio that the figures have no place to go, reducing them to flailing ninnies while failing completely to reproduce the left-to-right sweep of the book art. Extra points to Seuss, however, for the inclusion of an "eye-dancer" named Neefa Feefa.
THE DVD
The DVD transfers are as "acceptable" as the films they render. The Cat in the Hat could have used more lustre: the colours seem somewhat washed-out, definition is a tad fuzzy, and some of the yellow backgrounds give way to strobing. The 2.0 mono track, however, nicely reproduces the round vocal stylings of Sherman and never sounds harsh. The Lorax once again turns out to be the best of this lot, with slightly more vivid colours (aided in part by a more varied palette); nevertheless, its presentation succumbs to some of Cat's pitfalls, too, as it's plagued by jagged-pixel definition. The Lorax also has the best sound of the bunch, with the same full tones of the first disc filling out Eddie Albert's narration. With its feeble colours and substandard authoring, least once again is Pontoffel Pock, whose flat sound reflects an uninteresting original mix.
The extras are mainly perfunctory. The Cat in the Hat features an entirely gratuitous 4-minute preview of the upcoming Mike Myers movie, in which all participants have nothing but hollow praise for each other and minuscule production secrets are revealed. A chapter index of "Song Selections" allows you to jump from song to unmemorable song; there is also a sing-along to the song "Calculatus Eliminatus," with the lyrics printed on the bottom of the screen. Trailers for Casper, a two-disc set of the Babe movies, Sinbad, and Back to School with Franklin kick in automatically as the disc begins. It's more of the same for the Lorax/Pock DVD, sans movie preview: song Selections are back for both titles, as is the kiddie karaoke for "The Thneed Song" from Lorax and "Pull on the Push" for Pock. Again there are automatic trailers, this time for the Cat in the Hat movie, Back to School with Franklin and Johnny English.
- The Cat in the Hat
26 minutes; NR; 1.33:1; English DD 2.0 (Mono); English SDH, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-5; Region One; Universal - The Lorax/Pontoffel Pock and His Magic Piano
26 minutes; NR; 1.33:1; English DD 2.0 (Mono); English SDH, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-5; Region One; Universal
