#the-lorax

just practicing with contrasts again

The Lorax

★★☆☆☆

Directed by: Chris Renaud, Kyle Balda

Written by: Ken Daurio, Cinco Paul

Based on the Book by: Dr. Seuss

Since Hollywood started adapting Dr. Seuss books to screen, starting back with the live-action How The Grinch Stole Christmas starring Jim Carrey, I've felt most of the efforts have been pretty weak. In large part this is because the brilliance of the Chick Jones classic holiday cartoon starring the vocal work of Boris Karloff lie in the way it simply created a moving, breathing version of exactly what appears on the pages of the beloved book. Other than some silly slapstick animation-only sequences and a couple of musical numbers, the Grinch cartoon is 100% faithful to the source material.

Of course, Dr. Seuess' books aren't particularly long (though I've noticed they are rather long by today's children's picture book standards), so a 30-minute cartoon can get away with it but a 90 minute feature film needs some padding. And it is in this padding that I typically see the films unravel.

That said, I think The Lorax is perhaps the best of the bunch, including the previously animated efforts of Horton Hears a Who as well as the live-action Cat In The Hat and the aforementioned Grinch remake. The addition of Thneedville and the bookending storylines that put a name to the reader-stand in from the original story are perfectly suitable for children's animated feature fare. The animation is cheerful and correctly captures the peculiar whimsy of Seuss' drawings and the voice work is all nicely done as well as them happily including a number of semi-memorable songs. So far, so good.

The main problem I had with The Lorax is that the book itself, as is and as designed, is not well suited for adaptation to a kid's movie. And by "not well suited" I mean "not suited at all." Because the strength of the original story is in its melancholy, unresolved ending, the ending that is intentionally bleak and leaves but the barest glimmer of hope so that it serves as a sort of call to action and a socially poignant morality tale.

Obviously, this won't do at all for a movie aimed at kids. So the screenwriters tack on a happy ending where the bad guy gets his comeuppance, the boy gets the girl, everybody learns something and we get just a little tease of the environmental message inherent in the classic story as a pullquote just before the credits. Hardly energizing stuff. Don't get me wrong, I understand completely why they did this and I don't know that there was ever really any choice in the matter. I'm not sure why it seems like a book can get away with this but a movie cannot, but there you go. Perhaps it has something to do with Seuss's ability to hit the perfect note of finality but promise that comes across as worrisome but not oppressive and I think even genius level filmmakers creating a film for a highly sophisticated audience would struggle with that. The team behind The Lorax likely had no delusions.

In a way, that makes me want to say that this is a decent movie that just simply should never have been made. And there are a lot of little flubs and flaws along the way that cement this notion, too. For example, you have two young principal actors in Taylor Swift and Zac Effron, both of whom can sing. And yet at no point are either given a song to perform—in a musical feature! Instead we're treated to several songs by the capable but unremarkable Ed Helms who plays the Once-ler. And speaking of the Once-ler, the screenwriters decided that instead of making him a remorseful but genuine villain, they would supplant him with an all-new villain and re-cast his character as more of a manipulated loser who succumbs (and the movie strangely seems to make this seem almost understandable) to crippling greed.

There's sort of a half-hearted anti-commercialism message in there somewhere but it gets blurred; aside from being retrofitted into the new story, the Once-ler also loses his memorable anonymity from the original story (his face is revealed both in the flashback sequences as well as in his current, aged form) and the Lorax himself is given no real additional development beyond what was in the book (and he is, strangely, the only character to get this kind of treatment). Probably the biggest overall criticism is that the movie just isn't very funny most of the time. From the studio that produced the often hilarious Despicable Me, that's a big disappointment.