The Lorax is not The Lorax
The Lorax isn't really that good, and in fact it's pretty bad, but most tellingly it's also not The Lorax. Let me explain.
HEY. THAR BE SPOILERS AHEAD FOR THE BOOK/MOVIE. I GUESS. EVEN THOUGH EVERYONE ALREADY KNOWS THIS BOOK.
Others have already talked about the film's serious problems, but I want to point out the few positive points it has. As Lindsay Ellis excellently points out, adapting The Lorax to film innately would have involved "a different person [from the original author] with a different vision at the helm" but that "they already made this movie successfully - it was called WALL-E".
That actually, unfortunately hits the nail almost exactly on the head. Looking beyond the environmental elements, the most impacting moments in either are about elaborate artificial façades, which raise worrying questions for the target audience of both. This is what's raised by WALL-E's "lunch-in-a-cup" and holographic driving ranges and sunlight adjusted at a dial. This is what's raised by The Lorax's inflated hedges and plastic flowerbeds, asphalt painted green to look like grass, and a year-round (fake snow) skiing slope. When your lawn and your neighbors' lawns and the lawns in front of every office and school and so on can only look the way it does because of constant irrigation and a chemical cocktail of fertilizers and pesticides, you can start to see the point.
It's easy to stop at the patent environmental implications of this, and both films certainly could do more on the bigger ramifications of the façade (especially The Lorax), but at least in a few small ways, they both do. Remember John and Mary, the human beta couple in WALL-E? They work together to help WALL-E and EVE after knowing each other (and WALL-E and EVE) about twelve hours. That's not an attempt to cheapen their interaction - it's clearly among the most meaningful interpersonal connection they've had in their lives, because nearly all other communication they've had has been mediated through a skype-ish videochat program. When I first saw the movie, I actually had to wonder how they even knew what a "pool" was (among other items), since they'd never come into contact with one previously.
Just as all adults in WALL-E are pretty clearly depicted as cut-off from one another, the town of "Thneed-Ville" is an isolated police state, with seemingly no contact with the outside world, save of course an exhaust pipe for all of the wastes and byproducts produced in the town. The climax of the film, I honestly think, was the demolition of the city walls, exposing a lifeless hellscape of a former truffula tree forest to the average citizens of "Thneed-Ville". Glossed over by the movie are, of course, the economic realities of where their synthetic foods and the plastic for the town's various fake plants come from. Clearly, in addition to wastes being pumped out into the degrading outside, useful resources are absorbed into, processed within, and/or sold to the town. This is perhaps the one aspect of the movie done remotely, potentially better than WALL-E: the socio-economic implications of a society obsessed with constructed more and more elaborate artificially-isolated microcosms. In WALL-E, life in space is clearly unsustainable (remember the giant crusher WALL-Es dumping garbage into space?) but the pollution scarcely impacts Earth anymore during the movie (as they're literally in space). In contrast, the relationship between the town and the surrounding devastated countryside is a focal point, if often only implicit one, in The Lorax.
The potential lesson that could have been taken from a better adaptation of The Lorax would have directly confronted issues of class, nationality, and race instead of starting the ball rolling and then hiding from the questions (and answers) it raises. I think Lindsay Ellis is on to something with questions like "are there no other people in other towns [...]?" Where are the people who can't afford to live in town, who have to live outside of the city walls, or who are unable to pay for fresh air and synthetic gardens? Where are the people who live where the pollutants get dumped (other than the pollutants within the walls, which clearly affect some of the now-glowing children, but are also shown being expelled from the town time and time again)? This seems like an environmental version of the Gated Community Mentality - where accidents in poorer countries are permitted to kill thousands while media coverage for privileged communities remains minimal. In the rare cases when environmental disasters finally reach more privileged communities, it's literally and deliberately hidden from view. Arguably, that's the predominant cultural description of the United States and to some extent all economically-dominant countries now (and it's not just about perceiving ourselves and being perceived by others as cut off from our lifestyles environmental ramifications).
I'm inclined to appreciate this adaptation of The Lorax for just bringing these issues into the just-out-of-view-constantly-being-hinted-at-zone, when WALL-E didn't quite get there (even if it did absolutely everything else better though). That being said, we can't let The Lorax off scotch-free. It certainly didn't present those having to go without fresher air or other forms of comparative freedom from pollution. If it presents any sentient creatures as feeling the impacts of environmental degradation, it's assorted non-human animals, leaving us with the awkward choice between economically marginalized people being erased from or overtly dehumanized in the narrative. In effect, this adaptation emphasizes the tree-related fulfillment of the (white, middle-class) protagonists rather than various people's ability to sustainably access resources (or as Lindsay Ellis put it - "Taylor Swift told us trees are cool" is the driving rational for reforestation).
Beyond that simplification of the narrative, it's impossible to ignore the countless shady "environmental" endorsements this adaptation has done during marketing. There's already enough irony that a movie critiquing modern society's artificiality (admittedly in terms of creating naturalistic façades and synthetically manufactured oases, not really in general) appropriated its title from a beloved children's book that never touched that issue. Yet, it some how manages to be a very anti-corporate environmental film that publicized itself with almost nothing but anti-environmental corporations.
Ultimately, the movie can't be salvaged from any perspective - it refuses to acknowledge in any depth class as it relates to environmental degradation, it completely ignores the racial and ethnic dynamics (there are conveniently no indigenous people), and even on its own terms of exclusively considering the artificiality of privileged modern life it's nothing but hypocritical for focusing on issues unconnected with the original book. In short, it's an uncomfortably comfortable narrative - as long as trees (trees) exist, we get to pat ourselves on the back for being such good environmentalists. Rather than the slow, painful decline of the ecosystem's health and consequent effects we see in the original book (or 70s cartoon adaptation), there's no presentation of unfortunate ecological fragility without the earth being a pock-marked hellscape. There's only room for improvement if everything is at utter rock bottom.
This is a narrative that inevitably courts environmental degradation, ignores the relationship between the environment and race/ethnicity and/or class, and can ironically only focus on a superficial description of modern elite society's artificiality. That's not The Lorax I grew up with, in addition to not being how I want to spend my time or money.
HEY. THAR BE SPOILERS AHEAD FOR THE BOOK/MOVIE. I GUESS. EVEN THOUGH EVERYONE ALREADY KNOWS THIS BOOK.
Others have already talked about the film's serious problems, but I want to point out the few positive points it has. As Lindsay Ellis excellently points out, adapting The Lorax to film innately would have involved "a different person [from the original author] with a different vision at the helm" but that "they already made this movie successfully - it was called WALL-E".
That actually, unfortunately hits the nail almost exactly on the head. Looking beyond the environmental elements, the most impacting moments in either are about elaborate artificial façades, which raise worrying questions for the target audience of both. This is what's raised by WALL-E's "lunch-in-a-cup" and holographic driving ranges and sunlight adjusted at a dial. This is what's raised by The Lorax's inflated hedges and plastic flowerbeds, asphalt painted green to look like grass, and a year-round (fake snow) skiing slope. When your lawn and your neighbors' lawns and the lawns in front of every office and school and so on can only look the way it does because of constant irrigation and a chemical cocktail of fertilizers and pesticides, you can start to see the point.
It's easy to stop at the patent environmental implications of this, and both films certainly could do more on the bigger ramifications of the façade (especially The Lorax), but at least in a few small ways, they both do. Remember John and Mary, the human beta couple in WALL-E? They work together to help WALL-E and EVE after knowing each other (and WALL-E and EVE) about twelve hours. That's not an attempt to cheapen their interaction - it's clearly among the most meaningful interpersonal connection they've had in their lives, because nearly all other communication they've had has been mediated through a skype-ish videochat program. When I first saw the movie, I actually had to wonder how they even knew what a "pool" was (among other items), since they'd never come into contact with one previously.
Just as all adults in WALL-E are pretty clearly depicted as cut-off from one another, the town of "Thneed-Ville" is an isolated police state, with seemingly no contact with the outside world, save of course an exhaust pipe for all of the wastes and byproducts produced in the town. The climax of the film, I honestly think, was the demolition of the city walls, exposing a lifeless hellscape of a former truffula tree forest to the average citizens of "Thneed-Ville". Glossed over by the movie are, of course, the economic realities of where their synthetic foods and the plastic for the town's various fake plants come from. Clearly, in addition to wastes being pumped out into the degrading outside, useful resources are absorbed into, processed within, and/or sold to the town. This is perhaps the one aspect of the movie done remotely, potentially better than WALL-E: the socio-economic implications of a society obsessed with constructed more and more elaborate artificially-isolated microcosms. In WALL-E, life in space is clearly unsustainable (remember the giant crusher WALL-Es dumping garbage into space?) but the pollution scarcely impacts Earth anymore during the movie (as they're literally in space). In contrast, the relationship between the town and the surrounding devastated countryside is a focal point, if often only implicit one, in The Lorax.
The potential lesson that could have been taken from a better adaptation of The Lorax would have directly confronted issues of class, nationality, and race instead of starting the ball rolling and then hiding from the questions (and answers) it raises. I think Lindsay Ellis is on to something with questions like "are there no other people in other towns [...]?" Where are the people who can't afford to live in town, who have to live outside of the city walls, or who are unable to pay for fresh air and synthetic gardens? Where are the people who live where the pollutants get dumped (other than the pollutants within the walls, which clearly affect some of the now-glowing children, but are also shown being expelled from the town time and time again)? This seems like an environmental version of the Gated Community Mentality - where accidents in poorer countries are permitted to kill thousands while media coverage for privileged communities remains minimal. In the rare cases when environmental disasters finally reach more privileged communities, it's literally and deliberately hidden from view. Arguably, that's the predominant cultural description of the United States and to some extent all economically-dominant countries now (and it's not just about perceiving ourselves and being perceived by others as cut off from our lifestyles environmental ramifications).
I'm inclined to appreciate this adaptation of The Lorax for just bringing these issues into the just-out-of-view-constantly-being-hinted-at-zone, when WALL-E didn't quite get there (even if it did absolutely everything else better though). That being said, we can't let The Lorax off scotch-free. It certainly didn't present those having to go without fresher air or other forms of comparative freedom from pollution. If it presents any sentient creatures as feeling the impacts of environmental degradation, it's assorted non-human animals, leaving us with the awkward choice between economically marginalized people being erased from or overtly dehumanized in the narrative. In effect, this adaptation emphasizes the tree-related fulfillment of the (white, middle-class) protagonists rather than various people's ability to sustainably access resources (or as Lindsay Ellis put it - "Taylor Swift told us trees are cool" is the driving rational for reforestation).
Beyond that simplification of the narrative, it's impossible to ignore the countless shady "environmental" endorsements this adaptation has done during marketing. There's already enough irony that a movie critiquing modern society's artificiality (admittedly in terms of creating naturalistic façades and synthetically manufactured oases, not really in general) appropriated its title from a beloved children's book that never touched that issue. Yet, it some how manages to be a very anti-corporate environmental film that publicized itself with almost nothing but anti-environmental corporations.
Ultimately, the movie can't be salvaged from any perspective - it refuses to acknowledge in any depth class as it relates to environmental degradation, it completely ignores the racial and ethnic dynamics (there are conveniently no indigenous people), and even on its own terms of exclusively considering the artificiality of privileged modern life it's nothing but hypocritical for focusing on issues unconnected with the original book. In short, it's an uncomfortably comfortable narrative - as long as trees (trees) exist, we get to pat ourselves on the back for being such good environmentalists. Rather than the slow, painful decline of the ecosystem's health and consequent effects we see in the original book (or 70s cartoon adaptation), there's no presentation of unfortunate ecological fragility without the earth being a pock-marked hellscape. There's only room for improvement if everything is at utter rock bottom.
This is a narrative that inevitably courts environmental degradation, ignores the relationship between the environment and race/ethnicity and/or class, and can ironically only focus on a superficial description of modern elite society's artificiality. That's not The Lorax I grew up with, in addition to not being how I want to spend my time or money.