“I Speak for the Trees” – The Lorax (2012)

UNLESS someone like you cares a whole aw­ful lot, noth­ing is go­ing to get bet­ter. It’s not. – Dr Seuss

No trees, just plastic! Humanity’s night­mare, in­deed! Un­for­tu­nately, Dr. Seuss was right: we are head­ing to­wards a man­u­fac­tured fu­ture where air will no longer be free; where there will be no more trees to provide us with air… be­cause forests are des­troyed cease­lessly. Of course, some people have fi­nally awoken to the grim con­sequences of this tree mass de­struc­tion. Now, we are fight­ing to turn around from the en­vir­on­ment de­struct­ive road and do our best to save nature. 

The plot­line is, ap­par­ently, simple. Everything hap­pens in Thneed-Ville: a city where there are no real trees and everything is man­u­fac­tured. Ted falls in love with Audrey whose only wish is to see real trees. His grand­mother tells Ted that he has to find the Once-Ler to find out where he can get a tree. When Ted finds him, the Once-Ler starts telling the story about how, be­cause of greed and fame, he des­troyed the Truf­fula Trees forest. As he went in search for the Once-ler, Ted be­comes the only per­son who can save both the Once-ler and the world by plant­ing the last Truf­fula Tree. 

I think “The Lorax” is a good story for nowadays so­ci­ety. First writ­ten in 1971, the story writ­ten by Dr. Seuss is rather sug­gest­ive: everything de­pends on us; everything de­pends on our choice to change small things and then, to change the world. The movie pro­duced by Chris Renaud and Kyle Balda out­stretches the plot on more top­ics. I be­lieve this might be one of the reas­ons why the movie re­ceived bad re­views on IMDb, in­clud­ing the typ­ical Hol­ly­wood mark on “The Lorax”: 

Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax is cute and funny but the moral sim­pli­city of the book gets lost with the zany Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­tion val­ues (Rot­ten Tomatoes)

I be­lieve that when a movie is made with a book in mind, the book is al­ways bet­ter than the movie. BUT, the book and the movie are two dif­fer­ent en­tit­ies. An­drei Tarkovsky once said that: 

A book read by a thou­sand dif­fer­ent people is a thou­sand dif­fer­ent books (Goodreads).

The movie is based on “The Lorax”. The pro­du­cer star­ted from the book and from this point on, ex­ten­ded the idea. Im­ages have in­flu­enced us a lot, and today, the power of im­agery is even stronger, but that does not mean we can­not ima­gine fur­ther scenes from the ori­ginal text. I’m not a con­nois­seur in terms of movie mak­ing, but I be­lieve it can trig­ger ba­sic emo­tions in chil­dren (AND not only), such as hap­pi­ness, sad­ness, fun and tears.

The most ob­vi­ous ele­ment which the movie con­veys is the en­vir­on­mental is­sue our planet is fa­cing. We al­most got to the point where we live in a plastic bag. The more you ana­lyze it, the big­ger the fright gets. I mean, we live in a world where canned air already ex­ists. But we got ourselves into it. And if we have the power to cre­ate and im­prove ex­ist­ence, could we not de­velop our sense of pro­tec­tion just as much, and ac­tu­ally take care of the nature that makes our life possible?

The movie is also about the power of con­sumer­ism and how people are ob­sessed to have the top-notch items. In the movie, when Ted is won­der­ing where he could find a tree while eat­ing his lunch, his mother’s re­ac­tion shows how shal­low people can be and how they are try­ing to get rid of everything that is nat­ural:

Why do you need a tree? It just … sticks out of the ground and it does what? I don’t even know what it does. Look! We’ve got a tree! It’s the Oak-a-matic! Three modes! Sum­mer, Fall, Winter, and … Disco! (IMDb)

I think an im­port­ant life les­son here is also that people make mis­takes and suf­fer be­cause of them, but even­tu­ally, it is still them that man­age to find a way to get re­demp­tion. The Once-ler gets re­deemed when he fi­nally meets the Lorax again. The Once-ler real­ized his mis­take when the last Truf­fula tree was cut and the Lorax left him. Ted is the one who even­tu­ally helps him to make it up for his greed and to end his period of atonement. 

The pro­du­cers an­chor an edu­ca­tional pur­pose to this film try­ing to make chil­dren aware of en­vir­on­mental is­sues from a very early age. Again, the subtle idea of the book is rather lost with the movie, but everything de­pends on per­spect­ive, right? Dr. Seuss is more po­etic, more in­clined to­wards sug­ges­tion. Nev­er­the­less, I be­lieve the movie can still be enjoyed. 

References:

“Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax.” Rot­ten To­ma­toes. Ac­cessed on 19 Decem­ber 2019. https://​www​.rot​ten​to​ma​toes​.com/​m​/​t​h​e​_​l​o​r​a​x_2012.

An­drei Tarkovsky. Goodreads. Ac­cessed on 19 Decem­ber 2019. https://​www​.goodreads​.com/​a​u​t​h​o​r​/​q​u​o​t​e​s​/​1​6​0​1​4​.​A​n​d​r​e​i​_​T​a​r​kovsky.

The Lorax. IMDb. Ac­cessed on 19 Decem­ber 2019. https://​www​.imdb​.com/​t​i​t​l​e​/​t​t​1​4​82459/.

Selena Ac­qui

(writ­ten 12/21/2019)