Movie review: ‘The Lorax’

“Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax” proves definitively that when it comes to big-screen adaptations of the good doctor’s work, animation trumps live action.

Since Dr. Seuss died in 1991, Hollywood has produced two horrendous live-action adaptation of his classic books, “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” and “The Cat in the Hat,” and one surprisingly fine animated adaptation, “Horton Hears a Who.”

Produced by the creative team behind “Horton,” “The Lorax” doesn’t entirely live up to that film, but it still succeeds in the tricky task of remaining true to the text and the spirit of one of Seuss’ brief books while expanding it to feature length. The Lorax himself, voiced by Danny DeVito, tells us as much in a brief introduction when he says, “There’s more to the story than what’s on the page.”

Written during the burgeoning environmental movement of the early 1970s, “The Lorax” is perhaps Seuss’ most downbeat work, beginning and ending in a wasteland that was once a vibrant forest of Truffula trees. In the story, a regretful creature named the Once-ler, his face never seen, recounts how he ignored the warnings of a sprite called the Lorax, who emerged from a stump to speak for the trees, and decimated the forest in the name of industry and profit.

The movie includes the book in full, but adds fresh material to the start and finish and to the middle as well by telling the original story in installments. Director Chris Renaud (whose previous film was the delicious “Despicable Me”) sidesteps the book’s gloom by setting the new material in Thneedville, a big, colorful metropolis whose happy residents are oblivious to the gray blight just outside their city walls.

In the opening number, the Thneedvillians sing about their love for inflatable shrubbery and battery operated plastic trees, how they don’t care what happens to their garbage and how they are happy to pay for the fresh air manufactured by industrialist Aloysius O’Hare (Rob Riggle).

Emerging from this song and dance routine is young Ted (Zac Efron), who like most of his neighbors never gave a thought to the environment. But Ted has a crush on Audrey (Taylor Swift), who would be a tree-hugger if trees still existed. Incidentally, Ted and Audrey are the actual names of Dr. Seuss and his wife, who is still alive and listed as executive producer.

To woo fair Audrey, Ted hopes to find a live tree. His grandmother (Betty White) points him toward the Once-ler (Ed Helms), now living as a hermit outside the city. After a brief but creepy journey through the city’s hidden waste disposal system, Ted arrives at the Once-ler’s house and Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio’s screenplay arrives at Seuss’ original narrative.

Unlike like the book and the 1972 animated television special, the film reveals the Once-ler’s face and portrays him in the flashbacks as an ordinary man, though with extraordinarily long legs. The Once-ler’s green hands and forearms, his only features visible in the book, are revealed to be rubber gloves. I wonder if this is a mistake. Seuss intentionally kept the Once-ler anonymous, a portent that any of us could ruin the environment as haphazardly as he does. Perhaps the filmmakers found it impossible to tell a 90-minute version of the “The Lorax” with the Once-ler always outside the frame, but the story loses its haunting quality.

At first the Once-ler has a chummy relationship with the Lorax, that manifestation of the environment who looks like a cheese doodle with the face of a walrus. But when demand increases for his product, the Thneed, an all-in-one garment made from the cotton-candy tuft of the Truffula tree, greed overtakes the Once-ler and the axes come out.

The Once-ler equivocates the whole way. “You have to do what’s best for the company. I’m not bad. I’m the good guy here,” he says. Later, during his big 1970s-style power ballad, he sings, “How bad can I be? I’m helping the economy.”

Unlike the Once-ler, O’Hare does not struggle with his conscience. This villain, invented for the film, has no compunctions about exploiting the despoiled environment the Once-ler created. O’Hare must stop Ted from finding a tree, because once people realize trees produce air for free, O’Hare’s revenue stream will dry up.

If the book was a cautionary fable, the film can be a raucous satire that takes aim at consumerism. A pair of marketers convinces O'Hare to begin selling air in plastic bottles. "Our research shows if you put stuff in plastic bottles, people will buy it." They then show a parody of a beer commercial that ends with the admonition, "Please breathe responsibly." The targets of those gags are obvious. Much subtler are the jabs at global-warming
deniers.

Having played one of pop culture’s most famous pushy short guys, Louie De Parma on “Taxi,” DeVito makes an ideal Lorax. Otherwise, “The Lorax” falls into the celebrity voice trap. Helms, Efron and Swift, are adequate, but a host of less famous voice actors could have brought more life to their characters. On the other end of the scale, Betty White’s voice is too familiar, causing us to picture her instead of the crazy little lady on screen.

Other elements of “The Lorax” are too familiar as well, borrowed from other movies. Sometimes they work. Thneedville’s industrial bowels recall Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil,” a justifiable homage that no child watching will recognize anyway. But young viewers are likely to be jarred by O’Hare’s resemblance to Edna Mode from “The Incredibles.” He could be her brother. And the residents of Thneedville are similar in concept to the cheerful, coddled starship passengers from “Wall-E,” another computer-animated parable about the environment.

“The Lorax” delivers its message more aggressively than “Wall-E,” and its sense of humor is more biting. The filmmakers recapture the immediacy of the book. Dr. Seuss didn’t hide the moral to this story behind metaphor, no butter battles standing in for nuclear proliferation or vainglorious turtles standing in for Hitler.

Fresh from labeling the Muppets a bunch of hippies, FOX News blowhards didn’t wait for “The Lorax’s” release to decry it as a liberal attack on capitalism. The movie isn’t against capitalism, but some of the evils that can accompany it, namely greed and social irresponsibility. Here again, the filmmakers remain true to Dr. Seuss, a proud liberal. If “The Lorax” doesn’t speak for the trees, why bother filming it?

“Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax”
3 stars
Who’s in it: Voices of Danny DeVito, Zac Efron, Ed Helms, Taylor Swift
What it’s about: In a land where trees have been wiped out, a boy (Efron) tries to find a last tree to impress the girl of his dreams (Swift). He learns about environmentalism and the departed Lorax (DeVito), who spoke for the trees.
Rated PG for brief mild language
Running time: 1 hour, 34 minutes