The Lorax is a children’s book written by famous children’s book creator Dr Seuss. Published in 1971, the story chronicles the story of the Once-ler, a man who created an invention so popular that it started to sap the resources around him to their limit, mainly the areas trees disturbing the speaker of the trees, the Lorax. Unable to find a simple solution, the Once-ler continues his business and wipes out every tree on the planet, leaving a once beautiful paradise a blank empty wasteland. Years later, he instructs a young child of the errors of this mindset and the importance of protecting the trees, leaving it up to the child to plant the last seed left. It was a powerful, complex, dark, and incredibly smart book that is arguably one of the best representations of how to show children the importance of nature and the ramifications of taking it all away. The tragic, and highly ironic, thing about this is that this timeless simple yet powerful story, much like most of Seuss’ work, was turned into a film in 2012 by animation company, Illumination, and produced an animated film that is about as shallow and empty as the treeless landscapes of the story. In the fully plastic town of Thneedville, a young boy named Ted (voiced by the ADULT Zac Efron) wishes to get a tree to impress the girl he has a crush on, Audrey (voiced by Taylor Swift). Venturing into the desolate area outside the city, Ted meets the Once-ler (voiced by Ed Helms) and he tells him of the story how he met The Lorax (voiced by Danny DeVito) and how he’s responsible for the loss of all the trees. Ted has to find a way to get the plant into Thneed without getting the attention of the greedy businessman who controls the town and wants plants to stay dead. Much like most of the other Dr Seuss movies that have been put the Hollywood ringer; this film is incredibly childish, stupid, boring, dated, mindless and misses the point of its message in a big way.

The story for the book was full of meaningful moments, lines, and messages, but its was still a short book, leaving very little room for it to work as a fleshed-out movie only getting an animated television special released in 1972. This results in needing to add something else in to pad out the running time, which also means trying to mix Seuss material with generated Hollywood material and the results are as expected. The Lorax portion of the film is pretty to look at, but is also packed with dumb humor and references, a ton of dated elements, really simplistic characters and a botched happy ending, and the added stuff is boring, bland and incredibly cliched, filled with every expected ‘’environmental protection’’ gimmick that were old even back in the 90s. Making an environmental movie is nothing new as the 90s were very heavy on those kinds of films, so it becomes a lot more disappointing when this film takes a story that told an environmental message in a smart adult way and reduced it back to the most shallow and simplistic conveyance that the moral could have. In many ways, it focuses so hard on making the message as noticeable and obvious as possible, that it leads to the exact opposite response. Instead of being dark and thought provoking, it paints extremes in fanatical elements and dumbs down any realism whatsoever, instead of being complex and adult, its simplified and made easier to understand to make it more marketable to kids, and instead of adding onto the message with more time and focus, it detracts from its own message by shoving it too hard into people’s faces.

The characters in this movie are either annoyingly bland or annoyingly terribly. Every single cliched characters that could come from any standard kids movie is in this movie without anything different added on to make them different; the typical ‘’cool’’ kid, the hip rocking granny, the embarrassing parent, the love interest, and the stock bad guy. Getting people like Zac Efron and Taylor Swift to voice the leads feels incredibly off with how much they do not match the character’s voices (mainly with Zac Efron). The Once-ler is an incredibly unlikeable and annoying character; being nothing but a dated hipster-look alike jerk sporting a boring design and annoying voice. His character is never likeable to begin with, what was once a complex individual that went back and forth with his bad deeds in now motivated by a stereotypical evil family, his relationship with the Lorax could have been interesting but it never goes anywhere, and his transition from bad to good makes Anakin Skywalker’s turn look complex. The villain is also a massive slap in the face to the book’s message; placing a generic evil mold removes the notion that anyone could do harm to the environment, how creating an overly evil figure with no humanity sucks out the human element and makes it less realistic with how it can turn out in real life. That mixed with a terrible design and simplistic nature really hammers home how much its fails to capture the story’s true meaning. Probably the only positive thing that comes out of how these characters are handled is DeVito as the Lorax. While his writing is still pretty basic and boring, his voice is surprisingly fitting for the character and he is easily one of the better parts of the movie.

The one truly good thing about the movie is its animation quality and presentation. It is a genuinely pretty movie with great colors and lighting. While the slapstick element is pretty bad as the designs are too balloon like to work with physical comedy, the environments are nicely crafted and the style matches what a Seuss product looks like, it would be a great style for a Seuss movie if the material matched the animation quality. The music for this movie is like a fog; every single song goes right in one ear and out the other leaving no memorable lyric, melody or even tune that has not already been replicated. The idea of songs to begin with is already pointless as they are not used to further the story or be timeless, they are just there to pander to younger audiences and become the next ‘’popular’’ song played on the radio. They are dated and ironically focus way more on materialism and only one focused on being ‘’pro trees’’, it feels incredibly backwards. The score itself is not too bad as it at least conveys that the film is trying to be grand and epic even though the material does not equate to that. The writing is either incredibly standard for Illumination (even creating their own Minions clones with the fish), incredibly dated and filled with annoying pop culture references that furthers to ruin the book’s timeless power, and annoyingly simplistic taking what was once a complex human story about the consequences of real life struggles that taught kids an adult important lesson and is now a basic good vs evil story that gets a quick rushed happy ending with no consequences that every single person is going to forget about the minute they leave the theatre.

The most tragic thing about The Lorax is that is was arguably one of the few Seuss that tried to be a bit better. It did have a touch more effort put into in that something like Cat in the Hat or Grinch and even if it was misguided and backwards in its direction, it did try to follow what the book set out to do, it’s just a shame that it did it so terribly that it ruined all the good will.  While it’s still better than some of the other Seuss movies (mainly the live action junk), The Lorax still misses the fundamental elements that make its source material important and long-lasting, instead opting for a product of the time quick cash grab that pretends to be speaking for a good message. With a direction so backwards, it literally has advertisements connected to a Mazda car, it’s clear that while they may have cared a little bit more than usual, they clearly didn’t care enough.