The story begins in Thneedville, a seemingly happy town in which everything is manufactured out of plastic and there are no living plants of any kind. Ted (Zac Efron), an affable adolescent who is eager to impress Audrey (Taylor Swift), the pretty high-school girl who lives down the street, decides to take it upon himself to find a real, living tree. This mission takes him outside the fortified walls of Thneedville and into the decimated wastelands that surround it, where he must find the Once-ler (Ed Helms), a bitter hermit who supposedly knows what happened to all the trees. In lengthy flashbacks, the Once-ler tells Ted of how he was an eager young entrepreneur who discovered a valley full of swaying Truffula Trees, whose candy-hued, pinwheel tuffs were softer than silk and provided the perfect material for the production of his Thneeds, knitted scarf-like things that stand in for all the usefully useless material objects with which we fill our lives.

When the Once-ler chops down one of the trees, he inadvertently summons the Lorax (Danny DeVito, whose voice is exactly as “sharpish and bossy” as Dr. Seuss described), a pint-sized orange creature with a walrus-like moustache who claims to “speak for the trees.” The Lorax urges the Once-ler to leave the forest before he destroys the habitat, which is home to bear-like Brown Bar-ba-loots, soaring Swomee-Swans, and orange Humming-Fish, who here play a similar all-purpose comedy role as the Minions did in Despicable Me (they also act like a kind of humming Greek chorus, similar to the mice in Babe). The Once-ler protests that he means no harm and even promises not to cut down any more trees, but when his Thneeds become a hot item and he must increase production, it isn’t long before he is employing his opportunistic family members (rather unfairly portrayed as selfish rednecks) and building a massive factory that requires efficiency at the cost of sustainability.

Daurio and Paul’s script expands on Dr. Seuss’ slim picture book with new subplots, half a dozen rock-infused Broadway-style tunes composed by John Powell (How to Train Your Dragon, Kung Fu Panda, Happy Feet), and numerous new characters. While much of this works quite well, it also comes at the expense of Seuss’ poetic wordplay, virtually none of which is reproduced here in any form. While Ted appeared in the book, he was really little more than an unnamed cipher to whom the Once-ler could relate his sad story. Daurio and Paul supply him with a family (Jenny Slate voices his high-energy single mom while Betty White lends her voice to his devious Grandma) and a love interest in Audrey. They also expand the environmental theme via the creation of Mr. O’Hare (Rob Riggle), the diminutive CEO of a massive corporation that exploits environmental destruction by selling the gullible people of Thneedville bottled air and convincing them that they don’t want plants and trees because they’re dirty and messy (and not because they produce clean air for free). If the film has a weak point, it is Mr. O’Hare, who is so transparently evil that he lacks any real interest (he also proves that being short is the last physical attribute that can be unproblematically associated with vile behavior). The Once-ler, who is responsible for destroying the forest, at least demonstrates some sense of moral quandary, as his youthful idealism gives way to a thirst for more and more monetary success.

Not surprisingly, The Lorax quickly drew the ire of conservative commentators who saw it as anti-capitalist, pinko-commie indoctrination—an extension of last year’s leftist one-two punch of Cars 2 and The Muppets, which had the temerity to dig into the old cliché bag and pull out evil oil companies to play the heavies. Some have connected it to President Obama’s green initiative (even though the book was originally published when Richard Nixon was president), and on Fox News Lou Dobbs called it “insidious nonsense from Hollywood.” While there are some elements of it that are quite nonsensical (intentionally and otherwise), it is a far cry from insidious, unless one finds any parable that encourages us to consider the effects of our actions “insidious.”

Of course, the reverse argument—that there is nothing political or partisan about The Lorax—is equally absurd. Dr. Seuss, who cut his artistic teeth in the 1930s and 1940s as an ad man and then as a political cartoonist, knew full well the power of conveying ideas through clever, concise text and imagery, and when he wrote The Lorax, he did it with the specific intention of conveying his concern about industry “biggering” itself for no other reason than to become bigger and with no concern for anything else. The Lorax has been a political hot potato for years: In the mid-1980s the main character was adopted as an official mascot by the Washington-based environmental group The Global Tomorrow Coalition and the United Nations’ Environmental Program, and a few years later the book came under fire from the logging industry for unfairly depicting the cutting down of trees as the first step to laying waste to the environment. Interestingly enough, some liberal critics also took the film to task for watering down Seuss’ message and, more specifically, for allowing the book’s characters and ideas to be used for cross-promotional marketing of a new Mazda SUV. I guess there’s just no winning in a world where “liberal Hollywood” can simultaneously indoctrinate children into hating capitalism while also selling out progressive environmental values for crass commercialism and profitable marketing tie-ins.

Copyright ©2012 James Kendrick

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