How Hollywood Killed the Lorax - A Rant

Well, hope you all had a wonderful Christmas, you guys! I sure did - excepting that Legend of Zelda calendar that never came in the post because so many people were buying them up, I got pretty much all that I wanted and a little more besides, and right now I have a brand new Wii U set up in my bedroom, looking all slick and shiny in it's Premium Edition awesomeness. I could use this post to talk about how kickin' radical it is and how ZombiU is really difficult because I can't do survival horror and how Monita from Nintendo Land simultaneously terrifies and annoys me.

But instead, I'd like to bring you down from your post-Christmas high by talking smack about a terrible movie I saw recently.

In this case, Dr. Seuss's The Lorax with Danny DeVito.

Relesed in the spring of this (last?) year, The Lorax is loosely based on the award-winning book by Dr. Seuss (which I have recently discovered is meant to be pronounces "Soyss" because Germany is funny like that), in which the Once-ler, in his desire to become rich and corner the market for his all-purpose Thneed, ignores the pleas of the titular Lorax as he ends up causing massive ecological damage for the sake of gain. It's a cold, harsh metaphor for how rampant industrialization affects our planet, and unless somebody "cares a whole lot" then it's just going to get worse. Yet it ends on a high and hopeful note by implying that we, the ordinary person, have the power to ensure that we can avert what the Once-ler caused and balance progress with sustainability.

The film is none of that.

Watching this film on the family's recently-purchased Sky TV On Demand thing, I came away from the film with a distinct sense of being cheated. While I could complain about things like how Danny DeVito's deep voice doesn't seem to suit the orange fuzzball, or how ham-handed the film deals with the original themes, there's one giagantic tumour growing in the bowels of this picture that I want to take a blunt kinfe to until it stops kicking and screaming. Some months ago, Del complained quite venemously of Space Marine, calling it a boring, homogenous mess that doesn't try anything beyond ticking the standard Gears of War-esque shooter checkboxes, sometimes forcing the source material to conform to those standards. And if the same can be true for films, then The Lorax is quite similar in that regard, in that it's safe and by the numbers.

It doesn't try anything new, this 3D-animated checklist. It has everything one expects from a big-budget Hollywood production. It has a love interest. It has a villain. It has celebrity voices, with Danny DeVito's alarmingly deep tones coming from the Lorax being top billing. It has humour that balances the fine line between "family-oriented" and "unimaginative", with not one joke being funny in any regard (the line "That's a woman?!" in particular made me cringe). It has stock action sequences as our protagonist dodges the intruder traps set around the inexplibably belligerant Once-ler's house. It even has the bog-standard pop-culture reference - the sequence where the Lorax infiltrates the Once-ler's cart is set to the Mission Imposible theme tune, disregarding the fact that the reference stopped being clever a decade ago. Nothing new or radical is tried, and for a Dr. Seuss movie this is kind of an insult.



Look how insulted the Lorax is. Look at him.



And what creative liberties the film does take with the source material are either completely asinine or only exists to help the movie tick those Standard Hollywood Film boxes. As in the book, the story of the Lorax is told in flashback, but on this occasion it's framed by a post-apocalyptic setting where a boy called Ted tries to impress his girlfriend by getting a real Truffula tree, sneaking out of his gated, totally-synthetic community under the nose of the greedy, scheming Mayor O'Hare. Leaving aside the question of why an all-powerful man who controls the city's air supply feels threatened by a bit of greenery, this "new", cookie-cutter story pretty much shoves the original Lorax tale to the side in order to prance about waving coloured ribbons and blowing kisses to the dollar-waving audience. The whole hero-girlfriend-villain dynamic exists because the film didn't feel like it was being enough like a Dreamworks film, and the depressing-yet-hopeful message of the book is twisted into the bog-standard "we can change the world if we work together" that films like this continuosly spit out like everyone has ADHD. The climax of the film, where Ted busts a hole in the city walls to reveal the desolated landscape beyond, feels hollow and token, as if we've seen it a million times before (which we definitely have).

But it's not enough for the film to try and ape every other, better movie in existance, is it? No, it also feels the need to slap the source material in the face. There are multiple times where lines from the book are referenced in the Duke Nukem sense, where the characters immediately turn to the audience and go "gee, doesn't that sound completely stupid, I wonder what drugs Seuss was on when he wrote that, eh?" The film not only completely misses the subtext of the lines in the first place, but also has the gall to mock it for being written in the classical nonsense-poem style that made Seuss the literary genius he was in the first place, as if to say that modern audiences are too stupid to understand what the author was trying to get across. It's ham-handed attempts at, to quote the wretched hive that is TV Tropes, "Lampshading" the original material that make me want to reach other to where the producers live and strangle them for their incompetence.

Especially if they look like this. Seriously.

Instead of using Seuss's imagery and prose in clever ways, the film feels like it's simply going down a checklist to ensure it has everything that a movie of it's calibre is supposed to provide to an audience that apparently consists of slack-jawed sheep who'll consume anything if you dress the trailer up with enough faintly-recognizable eighties pop songs. And on top of that, it has the nerve to insult the source material that it's based on without any sense of irony, disguising ham-handed insults as self-aware parody in the same way one disguises a vicious killer bull as a fighting rooster by dressing it in feathers. The film has some clever moments (the Once-Ler being browbeaten by his family to resume logging when sustainably harvesting the Truffula trees proves too slow is a nice touch), but ultimately you could swap out half the material with that from any other Dreamworks or Pixar film and it would still be a boring, unintelligent mess that makes no attempt to push any envelopes whatsoever and parrots the same old messages most films of it's type do.

As an Animation student who takes a deep interest in films, this grinds my gears. The Lorax had so much potential as an animated film, especially since the technology involved means I lose track of time trying to count all the hairs in the Lorax's moustache. They could have run with the Seussian imagery to create a cautionary tale that hammers home the consequences of callous environemtnal destruction in the pursuit of money and succes, or perhaps span a story of how we as a species can live sustainably and not have to drive trees to extinction due to demand for all-purpose knitwear. But instead the studio showed no ambition above shoehorning in the same tired old tropes to ensure a safe product that doesn't scare away the average consumer and make guaranteed big bucks. And this dissapoints me.

The Lorax is not a film. It's a giant middle finger to your intelligence and Dr. Seuss in general. Avoid.