Seuss' sublime whimsy, is basically made fun of, or at least dragged down to Earth.
Early on, a character not in the book, Audrey, voiced by Taylor Swift, tells lovelorn 12-year-old Ted, voiced by Zac Efron, that once, nearby their now paved-over town, there were truffula trees: "The touch of their tufts was much softer than silk, and they had the sweet smell of fresh butterfly milk" - and Ted says, "Wow, what does that even mean?" and Audrey says, "I know, right?" So one of the only lines that is from the book, that does have Dr. Seuss' The Lorax, and little in the way of verse. It's a shame there's no narration in the animated feature, Dr.
Seuss aloud, with those serpentine, nonsense words flying out of your mouth as if on their own current. The result is about as factory-produced a film as it’s possible to make about the evils of commercialism, while the bulbous, Haribo-hued animation style reflects none of Seuss’s visual wit.And the wind smells slow-and-sour when it blowsĪnd no birds ever sing excepting old crows.
The Lorax himself may ‘speak for the trees’, and he’s voiced with some zest by Danny DeVito – but amid all this plasticky clutter, he scarcely gets a word in edgeways. Writers Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul, who previously failed to nail Seuss in ‘Horton Hears a Who!’, have retained the noble moral but added a litany of car chases, pratfalls, wacky grandmas and pint-sized villains to ensure twenty-first-century tykes aren’t bored getting to it.
An environmentally conscious fable about the perils of non-sustainable industry, it’s cast as a classical battle of wills between The Once-ler, a greedy, deforesting entrepreneur, and The Lorax, a mustachioed critter who acts as nature’s guardian. Published in 1972, ‘The Lorax’ is one of Seuss’s bleakest works. His wiry line drawings and bouncily absurd verse somehow resist being captured off the page, and this rigidly synthetic effort from the ‘Despicable Me’ team fares no better than ‘The Grinch’ and ‘The Cat in the Hat’. Successfully filming Dr Seuss is as difficult as getting a toddler to sit for an oil painting.
0 kommentar(er)
