Review: "The Lorax" is ad for save the trees campaign for some reason

"The Lorax" PG
Cartoons and movies dealing with saving the environment are nothing new, as Fern Gully, Captain Planet and Wall E, (save the earth) Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home, (save the whales) and many others have gone there. The Lorax seems to do it even more than Wall E though, and perhaps it suffers from the obvious tree hugger mentality. Like Fern Gully (save the rainforest) decades ago, the theme is if you cut down the trees you are evil and society will die, but in Lorax society goes to live in a faux town made of plastics, Thneedville the (need, get it).  where people drink artificially created air, and a little Napoleon like troll with Beatles hair rules from behind an iron curtain, er wall. When a young teenager tries to impress his redhead lady friend, she tells him if he could plant a tree she would give him a kiss, but the problem is there are no more trees. Even so, the boy heads off therough a secret door in the wall and goes into the smog choked dead forest of fluffy tree stumps. He finds a miserly old hermit who lives in a strange house who apparently had been responsible for the town, and the cutting of every single tree, decades earlier. As a young hick American boy, the person explained, he had come to the forest to create 'thneads', a kind of all purpose garment, but his greed, and his insane capitalist family, overwhelmed him and talked him into destroying the forest. The odd fusion of cronie capitalism, communist idealog living in a palace, and industrial powers destroying the environment seems like a blatant commercial for the liberal hippie party. It at times is a little too much. The children watching the film didn't care because it had pretty colors to see and a lot of fast paced stuff, and cute jokes, but the adults were scratching their heads. Eventually the old hermit gives the boy the last seed and instructs him to plant it, and it's a madcap chase to the end. The story though is so similar to Wall E one might call it a rip off. In Wall E, humanity destroys Earth and heads off in a lavish spaceship and forgets what happened to their planet, (unlike in say, Avatar), and returns to reestablish plants on Earth after a seed is discovered. Same idea here. It is also like Never Ending Story in some sense, and like Fern Gully (which would be a bad movie to copy), and it is like Captain Planet. The writers clearly thought unabashed capitalism is bad, which it is, but that it becomes somehow communist, hence an isolated walled city, a distopia in utopian guise). the hard right in politics probably will hate it. I thought it was a little too preachy and a little long, and didn't entirely have to hit the audience over the head with the ideas to be a good movie. It isn't bad. It just isn't great.
Review by Adam Browne