Lorax a simple tale that appeals to young and old

Happy 108th birthday, Ted. Yes, Dr. Seuss, even though you’ve been gone since 1991, the world still revels in your children’s literature with its decidedly adult themes.

The Lorax is an excellent story. Movies based on your books, on the other hand, don’t always have the same effect. Horton Hears a Who was probably the best of the lot but The Cat in the Hat most certainly was not.

This version, as usual, takes a different tack on the original. Here, our hero is Ted Wiggins (voiced by Zac Efron). He lives in Thneed-ville, a kind of pristine world that lives in a walled-in giant steel bubble, protected and sheltered from the barren wasteland that lies outside it.

Life in Thneed-ville is beautiful and perfect, with inflatable plastic trees, bottled air and incredibly large vehicles that only have room for one person at a time. Yes, this is edgy social commentary for families to laugh at and hopefully discuss at length afterward.

Ted wants to impress Audrey (Taylor Swift) who tells him that all she ever wants to see is a thing as lovely as a tree. Problem is, no one in the city has ever seen one. Thus, Ted becomes the first person to venture outside the wall, where he must encounter the Once-ler (Ed Helms), a ragged wastrel who once dared to thrive financially off of the avails of the very landscape that he destroyed.

He too was once a young lad like Ted but he dreamed of making multipurpose thneeds that could be anything you wanted them to be, decorative or functional. To do so, he started cutting down the cotton candy-like Truffula trees, protected by the Lorax (Danny DeVito). This furry, friendly but foreboding forest-dweller is a glorious example of passive resistance.

Sadly, the Once-ler clear-cuts everything in his greed for thneeds. His one-man textile industry brings automation and factory effluent to the once clean and clear expanse. The Truffula trees become a renewable resource logged to extinct non-renewable status. A sad state of affairs indeed.

This is the beautiful and simple kind of story for which dear Dr. Seuss was best known. Environmentalists and ecologists the world over celebrate the Lorax as a peaceful protector and harbinger of impending danger. This movie will likely infuriate the same political extremists who excoriated The Muppets for how it portrayed the oil industry as heartless, money hungry and blind to nature and the very soul of the world itself.

The Once-ler avoided awareness of the devastation he created until it was unavoidable. Likewise, Thneed-ville’s mayor, Mr. O’Hare (Rob Riggle), actively works to thwart actual plant life in town because they produce oxygen and that would negatively impact his bottled air concern.

The Lorax is the sort of cautionary tale that should bring adults and children together for its tender treatment of some very important issues. Environmentalism vs. industry is only the most obvious of these, but there are also the perils of consumerism and authoritarianism, the farces of modernization and progress, and the struggle of living in a society where people often spontaneously break into song.

Yes, it’s a message film but it does a fine job of still being entertaining, despite losing much of the bite of the original book. It still tells young and old alike that the straightest path to trouble is to disrespect the land, and the most direct way to the truth is tear down the wall, no matter how big.

I do wish that the protagonist were Audrey instead of Ted though. The songs, however, should end up on next year’s Oscar set list. Regardless, we still learn that unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing’s going to get better — it’s not.