The Lorax (2012)

I love Dr. Seuss

The truth is I really don't know anything about Dr. Seuss besides the books that he wrote.

For all I know he could have been a complete bastard of a person with a nag for writing fantastic children's books. I don't care. He's a phenomenal writer and he deserves a lot of credit for his work.

Now Dr. Seuss has hard material to adapt to film. Lots of time its really hit or miss. I loved How the Grinch Stole Christmas with Jim Carrey but The Cat in the Hat was complete shit.

I loved the cartoon, Horton Hears a Who... also with Jim Carey. And then there was this movie...

Now there were a lot of Dr. Seuss short cartoon films. How the Grinch Stole Christmas and The Lorax. They were really short films, maybe a half hour at max. They were really good films.

I don't want to do too many comparisons with the Lorax short cartoon for two reasons. 1) I haven't seen it in a long time and 2) I'd like to review the movie on its own merits. But I will do a couple comparisons to allude to the couple things essential to this movie.

So what is The Lorax about?

So the movie starts out in a town called Thneedville. Mainly following a boy named Ted (voiced by Zac Efron) who is in love with Taylor Swift. Or the girl she voices. She's obsessed with trees. The thing is, there is no such thing as a real tree. In Thneedville, everything is basically manufactured from a company called The O'Hare corporation. They capture air and sell it to its citizens. Its run by a short little man called Aloysius O'Hare.

So if you're reading this and wondering how this is related to the story of The Lorax... it doesn't.

So Ted asks his grandmother (voiced by Betty White) where he can find a real live tree. Betty White tells him to go find the Once-ler. And this is where the story of the Lorax is actually what it was meant to be.

The Once-ler (voice by Ed Helms) then proceeds to tell the story of when he came to this area with the purpose of making Thneeds, an ambiguous product that can meet all needs. When he cuts down the first truffla tree, the mystic creature, the Lorax (voiced by Danny Devito) appears and warns him that he shouldn't be cutting down trees because they are important to the ecosystem.

...but then the Once-ler stops the story!

He says he'll continue the story when Ted comes back the next day. Why? Because they needed to make this feature length thats why.

I'm not opposed to them making this movie a feature length movie, as long as its good. The rest of the movie is the Once-ler telling the traditional story, with a few twists, like the Lorax trying to send the Once-ler down the river, while going back to the present and throwing in the fact that O'Hare doesn't want trees to come back because the would mean the people of Thneedville get air for free.

The unfortunate part about this movie was that, I was just bored! The songs are so generic and boring that I don't even remember most of them. The humor is so childish that even children wouldn't think its funny. And even when there's an inkling that they're going to show some development in the one relationship that matters, the Once-ler and the Lorax, they go back to dumbass Zac Efron and Taylor Swift. I did like how they made the Once-ler a little more of a regretful person because hey, these movies need a happy ending and that was something the original cartoon really didn't give. But everything was just so rushed and abbreviated that I couldn't really enjoy their relationship because the Once-ler goes corrupt.

He gets so caught up in making money on Thneeds that he loses touch with the friendship that was never really developed in the first place.

Therefore its hard for me to care when he hits his low, and in the long run reunites with his friend in the end.

Now, I like Danny Devito.

Sure he's done some weird stuff, and yeah he's got a weird sense of humor. But he's funny and I think he would have done a brilliant job as the Lorax if this movie had some heart to it. For a movie called, the Lorax, he's barely in it.

But it doesn't. All the characters are so bland and one-dimensional that I got really bored and started playing Left 4 Dead halfway through the movie.

The songs are too generic for anyone to really enjoy and they almost sound like their being made for a children sing-a-long tape instead of an actual song that would make sense for that character to sing.

I'm mainly thinking about the song Ed Helms sings when he's creating his corporation and he's cutting down all the trees he said he wouldn't.

I'm pretty sure I can hear children singing in the background with him. Its annoying, its contrived, and it has no heart.

I'll give it the animation for this movie is not bad, but keep in mind, these are the people that created Despicable Me. That movie had heart but it also created a little thing we now know as Minions.

I mean how freaking adorable is that.

Now granted it wasn't totally about the appearance, while that may be enough for some people. No, a lot of it had to do with the utter nonsense they said and how freaking adorable and hilarious their grunts and screams were.

So how can we capitalize off something like that without totally ripping off the minions?

Well of course we can throw in the little bears, birds, fish, anything in the world of Doctor Seuss, give them a couple grunts and squeals of complete innocence and that'll get the people laughing right out of their seats right?

Now I'm not heartless. You throw me into a world full of those wide eyed little bastards of course I'm gonna give a little bit of an awe and be impressed with the animation.

But they wanted to capitalize on these guys WAY too much.

Now don't get me wrong, I liked the story with the Once-ler and the Lorax a lot better than that dumbass Zac Efron and Taylor Swift, but everything was put into the relationship between the Once-ler and the Lorax and even that was incredibly under developed.

Rereading this review is just a mess, and it kind of reflects this movie.

It had no heart, no good humor, and was trying way to hard to make something more than it needed to be. The Lorax is a great story about being conscious of the environment. Its not proclaiming global warming or that corporations are totally evil. Its just saying we should do our best to keep the Earth clean for the people that come after us.

The boy doesn't need to have a name or be doing this for a girl because the boy represents more than just a character. He represents the audience.

The Once-ler can have a family that he wants to impress, he can be a sympathetic figure, but it needs to be done correctly.

The Lorax just needs to be the voice for the trees. Sure he can be funny, sure he can have more lines than "I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees" but if the movie is named the Lorax, you better put the damn Lorax in the movie.

And we don't need this guy.

Seriously, he gave me a headache.

I want to watch Horton Hears a Who again because while that movie definitely had its problems, it kept to a simple formula. Horton needs to get the flower to the top of the mountain in order to save the Whos that live on that flower. Sure, some of the stuff that happened in the Who town was kind of stupid but it had heart.

This is just a sad rip off of WALL-E and just gave me a huge headache. There's a lot more I can say about this movie, about the way it shits on corporations while having some of the most corporate sponsors for advertising, but I'm tired and I don't want to think about this movie anymore.

So obviously, I did not like this movie. What do you think? Did you like it? Tell me what you thought.

I'll leave you with this. I love Its Always Sunny In Philadelphia, Danny Devito is in that show. Here's a really inappropriate video from that show. Its explicit and really crude humor... you've been warned.