DR. SEUSS' THE LORAX

DR. SEUSS' [sic] THE LORAX. Chris Renaud, dir.; Kyle Balda, co-dir. Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul, script, from the book by Dr. Seuss (pseud. Theodor Seuss Geisel). USA: Illumination Entertainment, Universal Pictures (prod.) / Universal (US and Canadian dist.]), 2012. Yarrow Chenny, prod. design. Eric Guillon, art direction.

Eco-friendly animated propaganda film for children, finely nuanced for the medium and genre and of high artistic quality. Significant here for the trope of the Modernist City-of-Today — sic: Today, actually, more than Tomorrow — literally done in plastic, with nature rigorously excluded and kept beyond a wall (cf. Yevgeny Zamiatin's We [ca. 1920], cited and annotated in Clockworks [1]). The City looks good, but it is a company town, tightly surveilled by the ruling plutocrat, who sells air bottled in ways that make it look very much like bottled water. The City also has problems with radioactivity, but that is not stressed. Beyond the wall is a treeless wasteland; the transition space from City to wasteland is highly "Industrial." Long flashbacks account for the rise of the current form of the City, and the making of the wasteland from a beautiful, biologically diverse, nicely magical forest. The destruction of the forest was the doing of a rather sympathetic entrepreneur who just wanted to succeed and offer a product people might want (although it is nothing people need). These motifs will be familiar to adult students of SF and most fans of cyberpunk SF films, but they will be new to the kids. CAUTION: The film has a hopeful ending, and the subversion is gentle and good for children (and for the planet they will inherit), but the movie may reinforce an unfortunate trend of negative characters of non-normal size: the plutocrat villain is very short; the repentent entrepreneur tall and thin — etc., though Erlich would condemn mostly another damn short villain (cf. Lord Farquaad of SHREK [1] and Rumpelstiltskin in SHREK 3 & 4 ).

5. DRAMA, RDE, 06/III/12