Poetic justice: Blue Sky Studios stretches CG technology into a Seuss-worthy style.(CGI)

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On the fifteenth of May, in the jungle of Nool, In the heat of the day, in the cool of the pool, He was splashing ... enjoying the jungle's great joys ... When Horton the elephant heard a small noise.

So begins the 1954 Dr. Seuss classic Horton Hears a Who! The small noise, of course, comes from a speck of dust blowing through the air. The dust carries the entire microscopic city of Who-ville and its inhabitants, and the Mayor of Who-ville was yelping for help. In the story, Horton, who can hear the Whos but not see them, rescues the tiny creatures and protects them, despite the efforts of a disbelieving kangaroo, some jungle monkeys, and a black-bottomed eagle. Because, as Horton says, "... a person's a person, no matter how small."

As with all his stories, Dr. Seuss--the pen name for Theodor Seuss Geisel--illustrated this book with fanciful pen-and-ink drawings of outlandish animals and fantasy creatures, inventive contraptions, and slightly surreal backgrounds. Over time, the drawings have come to life as short animated films, and former Looney Tunes animator Chuck Jones turned one, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, into a TV special.

But, while Dr. Seuss stories became live-action films, no one had attempted to interpret his style with 3D computer graphics until now. Twentieth Century Fox's Horton Hears a Who!, directed by Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino, and created at Blue Sky Studios, is the first.

Blue Sky Studios, a wholly owned unit of Fox Filmed Entertainment, has been at the forefront of 3D computer graphics since several former Tron crew members founded the company in 1987. The studio's short film Bunny won an Oscar in 1999, and Ice Age, Blue Sky's first feature, received an Academy Award nomination in 2003, as did two shorts, Gone Nutty (2004) and No Time for Nuts (2007). The Looney Tunes type of animation used for the character Scrat, who starred in the recent shorts, and the rendering style used for Bunny would both come into play in Horton to create characters, sets, props, and effects in Dr. Seuss's style.

"One of the really difficult things, and I think we did it successfully, was to stay true to Theodor Geisel's vision," says Carl Ludwig, vice president and chief technology officer at Blue Sky Studios.