The Lorax (2012)
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The Lorax Movie Review
The Lorax is a 2012 animated family fantasy film directed by Chris Renaud. This is one of Illumination’s weakest movies.
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“A tree falls the way it leans.
Be careful which way you lean“
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Ted, a 12-year-old boy, sets out to search the long-extinct Truffula tree to impress the girl of his dreams. However, in his journey, he has to overcome a number of obstacles. This movie is based on a famous titular children’s book by Dr. Seuss. It’s all about the environmental message and how trees are important and how big companies are dangerous for nature.
There is still that story here in the movie’s core. The quest to return the trees is basically the whole story. And yet, I did not feel this message whatsoever. Why is that? Well, the movie is overly modern first and foremost. It is too contemporary in both musical numbers and too much action. Secondly, being made by a big studio and preaching about the dangers of big companies was ludicrous to me, and the whole movie’s intentions simply always felt fake.
The ending is fine and the beginning is suitably mysterious and intriguing. The Lorax has its memorable scenes and adventurous as well as sweet moments, but the biggest problem here is obviously that framing. It was a horrible choice to make the film all about this flashback, which was told by the titular creation. That was ridiculous as it made the movie small and not cinematic enough. It was overly faithful to the source material and it simply did not work.
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Let’s talk about the characters. Danny DeVito voiced the small yellow guy wonderfully. He is awesome as he always is. His voice fits this role perfectly and I loved listening to him. The character also worked and was both cute and funny. Ted was boring. Zac Efron’s voice wasn’t all that good for animation and the whole love interest for the character was needlessly included and that entire subplot was mediocre.
The mother and the granny are much better. They are a very fun family because of these two great personas. Ed Helms did a good job as the catalyst for all of the story, but overall the flashback was tiresome as I have said already above. The villain is also one-note and utterly forgettable unfortunately.
The Lorax looks excellent. The mixing of the typical Dr. Seuss aesthetic along with the standard Illumination animation practices was interesting to witness, and the movie looked both modern and old-fashioned simultaneously. It’s polished and very appealing with the character designs being particularly strong.
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I wish I could say the same about the songs. They are very mediocre. Let It Grow is passable, but others are all much weaker with the number How Bad Can I Be? being particularly annoying. These numbers all sounded painfully contemporary, which clashed with the source material so hard. The pacing was also overly frenetic and the structure was all wrong as was the direction. It’s just a miss all around unfortunately.
