Fridae

Anyone who was a child or teen in the early to mid-90s will be reminded of the enviro-toon craze that shaped much of Saturday Morning television then, at a time the whole world seemed crazy about reducing CFC emissions in the wake of the Montreal Protocol. The success of Ted Turner's Captain Planet and the Planeteers franchise spawned other such series as Smoggies and The Little Flying Bears and the modestly successful film Ferngully: The Last Rainforest. In hindsight, all of these series viewed today feel barely realistic, often heavy-handed and unsubtle, and overrated in their social consciousness. The real world polluters are never, one realizes as one grows up, the cackling supervillains seen in these series, but most of the time, ordinary people.

The Lorax is both a throwback to that era, for better or worse, as well as an adaptation of a work that could be argued to be their predecessor, Dr Seuss' iconic picture book about a wise creature that speaks for the trees and tries to stop a greedy entity from destroying them all. The crew at Illumination Entertainment expand and build upon Seuss' short but rather bleak little book to create an entertaining but no less moralizing piece.  

The story opens in the completely artificial dystopian little town of Thneedville, where young Ted (Efron) seeks to impress his leggy crush Audrey (Taylor Swift) with a gift of a truffula tree, which used to grow abundantly in the world outside Thneedville. With his wise grandmother (Betty White)'s help, Ted escapes to seek out a mysterious man known as the Once-ler. The bulk of the film takes place in fact, as a flashback by the Once-ler (Ed Helms) who as a young man recklessly destroyed an entire valley of Truffula trees against the advice of the valley's short, fat guardian spirit, The Lorax (voiced by the similar short and fat Danny De Vito as another of his fast-talking sitcomly curmudgeons). Ted comes up against the town's diminutive tycoon and apparent ruler: Aloysius O'Hare, who is on the verge of improving the profits of his packaged air business by increasing the pollution levels to increase the demand for his product.

Director Chris Renaud continues using much of his same toolbox from his previous effort, Despicable Me, combining well-paced action sequences with striking camerawork and absurdist creature comic relief humour in the form of a race of Ewok-like Teddy Bears and fish that can walk on land, both to the film's detriment and benefit. To its benefit because the film is nonetheless ridiculously entertaining; to its detriment because it feels too light and airy as a result. The problem here largely rests with the script: the film does not quite know if it is to be about the Once-ler or Ted, and as a result while the former is better developed as a character than the latter, it's to the film's detriment that neither are developed as fully as they should. For all its bright colours and technical dazzle (including some musical numbers), The Lorax remains little more than an earnest but heavy-handed enviro-toon hampered by a flawed script.