is much kinder than his mother. Niecy Nash as Miss Yelp, Mayor McDodd's secretary. Laura Ortiz as Jessica Quilligan, a Russian Palooski, Mrs. Quilligan's daughter and one of Horton's students. Colleen O'Shaughnessey as Angela, a female glummox and one of Horton's students. Joey King as Katie, a cute and eccentric baby yak. Bill Farmer as Willie, an orange bear and Tommy's dad. Marshall Efron and Tim Nordquist as the Wickersham Guards and brothers, Yummo's younger brothers and Henchmen. Heather Goldenhersh as Who Girl Charles Osgood as the Narrator Production After the critical and commercial failure of The Cat in the Hat 2003 film, Dr. Seuss' widow, Audrey Geisel, was so unhappy with the film that she then decided not to allow any more live-action feature films based on his work. In March 2005, as Blue Sky Studios was completing Robots, the studio and 20th Century Fox Animation president Chris Meledandri asked Geisel about getting the adaptation rights for Horton Hears a Who!. The art director for Robots, Steve Martino, along with story consultant and additional scene director Jimmy Hayward, created a model of protagonist Horton and some animation tests to showcase their design ideas to Geisel, who eventually agreed on "a seven-figure deal" for both the book and its predecessor Horton Hatches the Egg. Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio were then hired to write the script, to be directed by Hayward and Martino with a set release date of 2008. Geisel was credited as a supervising producer and watched production up close, and also gave the directors full access to her late husband's archives, including his original sketches, 3-D sculptures, work done for the film The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. (1953), and even memos Dr. Seuss traded with Chuck Jones during the production of the Grinch TV special. For references in doing the character animation, along with footage of the voice actors performing their lines, the Blue Sky animators recorded themselves performing the script in an "acting room" to see what of their body language could translate well into the film. To make Horton different from and look different compared to the mammoths Blue Sky worked with in the Ice Age series, he would at times able to stand and walk upright on two legs making him somewhat bipedal, in a way that made him look like "a fat man in an elephant suit". While the design had a