Despite what you see at the multiplex, The Cat in the Hat isn’t really about a grown man in a Pep? Le Pew costume looking at boobs and selling potato chips. The book is actually a lot more crafty than that :

“I’m subversive as hell,” Geisel declared in an interview decades earlier, shortly after winning the Pulitzer Prize. “The Cat in the Hat is a revolt against authority, but it’s ameliorated by the fact that the cat cleans up everything in the end. It’s revolutionary in that it goes as far as Kerensky and then stops. It doesn’t quite go as far as Lenin.”

The origins of The Cat in the Hat, too, are political — in the broadest sense of empowering the powerless. Geisel was of the opinion that “too many writers have only contempt and condescension for children, which is why we give them degrading corn about bunnies.” Clearly, they deserved better.
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Other interpretations are more political in focus. Art Spiegelman, in his essay accompanying Richard Minear’s Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel, posits the cat as a permutation of Uncle Sam in his stovepipe hat. (In many of Geisel’s earlier political cartoons, the U.S. is figured as a busted-down eagle in a high hat.)

It’s worth noticing that The Cat in the Hat was written not long after the Americans ended their peacetime occupation of Germany and Japan. Can it be read, one wonders, as a parable of American interventionism, with Geisel implying, albeit subliminally, that the United States always cleans up its mess? (Okay, so he had a few all-American blind spots.) Still, it’s not so far-fetched when you consider that he declared Horton Hears a Who to be inspired by the plight of the Japanese following the war.

Okay, so Spiegelman’s analysis may be a bit farfetched, but it’s not like this would be the first time Seuss slipped pointed political themes into his books

But Geisel’s other works tackle a host of political issues with increasing explicitness. The Butter Battle Book, with its escalating, fear-driven contest between the Yooks and the Zooks, is a cautionary tale about nuclear proliferation. Horton Hears a Who brings us a kindhearted elephant who saves the kingdom of microscopic Whos from extinction. (Are the Whos the Jews?)

Yertle the Turtle is, by the author’s admission, a take on Hitler’s rise to power. (In early drafts, Yertle sports the Fuhrer’s short-cropped mustache.) And in The Sneetches, a capitalist named Sylvester McMonkey McBean profits from the trade in imprinting and erasing stars on the bellies of the trend-conscious bird-like beasts, manipulating their desire like the expert Madison Avenue ad man Geisel himself once was. (These stars are also, for many readers, an echo of the Star of David borne by Jews in Hitler’s Germany.)

Geisel’s own favourite of his books, however, was The Lorax, in which the rapacious Once-ler discovers the profits to be made from chopping down all the truffula trees, building factories and convincing the masses of the need for thneeds (an ambiguous knitted garment), which he produces in his pollution-spewing textile factory. The Swomee Swans fly away looking for fresh air, and the Humming-Fish die. At the end, just one seed is left from which regeneration might begin anew, held aloft by the Lorax, a short and fuzzy prophet of environmental doom, and a repository of wisdom for the future.

Readings of the book have taken place in anti-logging rallies from the Pacific Northwest to Australia, and several U.S. school boards have been petitioned, unsuccessfully, to censor the book, with Seuss detractors alleging that it misrepresents the forest-products industry.

Together these works are delicately coded moral parables on the perils of capitalism, xenophobia and intolerance.

Geisel’s biographer, Neil Morgan (who wrote the definitive Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel with his wife, Judith), insists on the central importance of political ideas in Geisel’s work, but says that the artist thought of it rather just as ethics, as a case of teaching kids, and maybe their parents, what’s right and wrong.

As far as the movie goes, I can’t really comment on it since it looks like a stinky (but colorful) pile of shit. If it’s anything like The Grinch, then it has no business being called “Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat”.