By Sarah Sluis
Dr. Seuss may be known for his whimsical wordplay and kindergarten rhyming patterns, but my favorite books by the author were always the ones that tackled the metaphorical. The Butter Battle Book is a metaphor for the U.S./Soviet Cold War arms race, of all things. His 1971 The Lorax tackles another topic of the age: environmentalism. In the book, colorful, poofy trees are brought to extinction by careless deforestation. I'm pretty sure we watched the 1972 video adaptation in my high school biology class.
Illumination Entertainment, the animation studio behind last year's hit Despicable Me, adapted Dr. Seuss' classic book, which will release in March next year. Universal just debuted the trailer. The animation is colorful and delightfully non-realistic. But the Dr. Seuss-isms? Gone. In the trailer the young boy refers to the missing trees, not the "Truffula Trees" as they're referred to in the book. It doesn't even make sense, since the set design has normal, green trees in the neighborhood surrounding the boy. Are those supposed to be fake trees? Nor is there mention of the Swomee-Swans, Brown Bar-ba- loots, Humming-Fishes, the Thneeds, or even the Once-ler. I understand that the characters can't talk in rhyme for ninety minutes, but I thought they would keep in more of the silly language Dr. Seuss uses.
The Lorax has another challenge on its hands. Though the trailer doesn't really hint at it, the book's plot is short and sweet. Subplots will have to be added in to bring the movie to feature-length. At least one subplot will be a teenybopper romance between the boy (voiced by Zac Efron) and a red-headed girl (voiced by Taylor Swift). March has become a popular time to release animated movies, bringing Monsters vs. Aliens (2009) How to Train Your Dragon (2010) and Rango (2011) to decent tallies for early spring titles. The Lorax could be next. Even forty years after The Lorax was initially published, the need to protect our environment has not diminished.
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