"The Lorax" trailer

An adaption of a Dr. Seuss book with needless story padding & generic kid's movie slapstick? Fourth verse, same as the first.



The thing that continuously disappoints me about the Dr. Seuss movies is that they all have seemingly no interest in actually capturing the tone of a Dr. Seuss book. They just take the basic plot and the aesthetics and drape it over a formula slapstick kids movie. There's no real sense of the surreal or childlike wonder. When I was a little kid my mom used to read me stuff like The Butter Battle Book & The 500 hats of Batholomew Cubbins, and they always felt to me like bizarre fairytales & fables that existed in a world all their own, not some wacky sugar rush. These movies feel more like the cereal commercials I watched in the 90's rather than the bedtime stories that soothed me to sleep.

Once again they seem to be really stretching out & filling in relatively small parts of the book to pad out the running time, in this case giving a name & a backstory to the previously nameless boy to whom the Once-ler narrates his encounters with the titular Lorax too. This strikes me as particularly unnecessary. Unlike The Cat & the Hat, The Lorax was one of the longer of Dr. Seuss's books, it seems to me there's plenty there to work with. Even more baffling, they seem to have reworked things so that he is in fact the star of the film, with the Once-ler & the Lorax as merely side characters whose story inspires him to "speak for the trees!" For the trees have no tongues, you see.

Yes, I do apologize for that joke.

Also, WHY CAN WE SEE THE ONCE-LER's FACE??!! I know that seems like a nitpick, but The once defining visual aspect of the Once-ler was that all you ever saw of him with a pair of long green gloves. These movies have at least been good at replicating Seuss's artwork up until now.