Rainbow-barf Monstrosity

I /love/ The Lorax. It was a favorite book of mine as a child (and an adult), and I’ve written about it here before in conjunction with Banned Books Week and Earth Day.

Unfortunately someone, somewhere took that book and decided it would be a good idea to turn it into a movie.

This is not a good idea.

The Lorax isn’t a good “movie” sort of book.  The ORIGINAL Grinch is a fabulous movie that stays true to Seuss’ ideas and ideals in writing the original book, but modern adaptations of it have failed spectacularly, falling into the traps of CGI and comedian actors instead of trying to tell a really good, if didactic, story.

The Lorax doesn’t have the happy ending that the Grinch has. The main character is a greedy asshole with little ability to look beyond his own want for more stuff, more money, and more fame. In fact, The Once-Ler doesn’t even show up in the book, he’s simply a faceless portrayal of power and greed. The Lorax is a sad story of destruction and downfall, with a faint glimmer of hope at the end for humanity’s ability to feel empathy for those not like itself.

The Lorax himself isn’t much of a fuzzy happy character either. His primary functions are observation and warning. He speaks for those who can’t speak, but he doesn’t get involved in the story itself.

As expected, the preview for the movie is a disgusting pile of rainbow-barf, to quote from David Roberts’ review on Grist.

If, to make a movie, you must take a book and totally change the story, the characters, and the setting, add humor by making non-humorous characters into physical comedy jokes*, and couch the entire thing in a “boy wants to get into pants of girl next door”, you might want to just not make the damn movie.

*including a joke in the trailer about how a fat woman doesn’t look womanly enough to recognize, a point rather antithetical to the point of the original story, which is to think about your actions in relationship to others. Gee wonderful. It seems to me that the Lorax, whose function is to speak for those who don’t have voices, probably wouldn’t be fond of demeaning jokes at the expense of others.