i was just surfing the net, minding my own business, when i found this…
i'm surprised they're even doing "The Lorax" as a movie. i still remember the animated special version.
Dr. Seuss' The Lorax
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Danny DeVito as the Lorax and Betty White as the Grandma? Sold. XD It seems like the movie may go past the ending of the book a bit; the idea of that has me curious.
And I know it was never a book, but I'm still hoping against hope for a full-length movie of "Pontoffel Pock, Where Are You?". It's probably too Aladdin-ish, but I think they could really do something good with it if they had a full 90 minutes to work with…
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I already knew about this from last year, so I've been itching to see a trailer.
But, based on what I just saw, it looks like they're going to change the whole setup of the story.
Plus, they added in new characters that weren't even in the book. -
Hmm, not sure if want. Looks like it's going to deviate quite a bit from the book, which I guess I can understand since it would hard to stretch the plot out for 90+ minutes. Is the Onceler even going to be in this? Looks like we saw his house, but I didn't see the Onceler himself.
And the lamb lies down on Broadway
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Danny DeVito as the Lorax and Betty White as the Grandma? Sold. XD It seems like the movie may go past the ending of the book a bit; the idea of that has me curious.
And I know it was never a book, but I'm still hoping against hope for a full-length movie of "Pontoffel Pock, Where Are You?". It's probably too Aladdin-ish, but I think they could really do something good with it if they had a full 90 minutes to work with…
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if they did that, then I'll be very impressed. i might even watch it.
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Hmm, not sure if want. Looks like it's going to deviate quite a bit from the book, which I guess I can understand since it would hard to stretch the plot out for 90+ minutes. Is the Onceler even going to be in this? Looks like we saw his house, but I didn't see the Onceler himself.
From what I've heard, the Once-ler is supposed to be the guy with the green gloves and the axe.
Which is somewhat dissapointing, because the Once-ler was supposed to be a mysterious, ambiguous character. -
To take what is a ten minute tale when read
And stretch it to a twenty two show insteadEven Chuck Jones could only stretch so long
To make such a feat work and not feel wrongIt does not work at all in the least,
These movies they intend to be a beast.They try to grow it, to fill out the time
And it lacks joy, whimsy and rhyme.Always they try and try and try and try
But in the end, the crowd justs asks… "Why"? -
I heard that after "The Cat in the Hat" starring Mike Meyers, the widow of Ted Giesel put an indefinite ban on any more live-action versions of his books. Makes me wonder how she felt about that CG version of "Horton Hears a Who"…
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@RobbyBevard:
To take what is a ten minute tale when read
And stretch it to a twenty two show insteadEven Chuck Jones could only stretch so long
To make such a feat work and not feel wrongIt does not work at all in the least,
These movies they intend to be a beast.They try to grow it, to fill out the time
And it lacks joy, whimsy and rhyme.Always they try and try and try and try
But in the end, the crowd justs asks… "Why"?
–- Update From New Post Merge ---
I heard that after "The Cat in the Hat" starring Mike Meyers, the widow of Ted Giesel put an indefinite ban on any more live-action versions of his books. Makes me wonder how she felt about that CG version of "Horton Hears a Who"…
Oh man, that movie was god-awful.
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It looks as good as the Horton Hears a Who movie they did; which is to, not very good at all.
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Um, are we dissing the Horton Hears a Who movie? Because I actually thought that was pretty good.
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Even Chuck Jones could only stretch so long
To make such a feat work and not feel wrongDePatie-Freleng made the television special of The Lorax; not Jones.
Far as this goes… eh, I dunno. The point of The Lorax is that problems created by greed and shortsightedness usually can be easily avoided and require hard work to fix if that's even possible. If they stick to that, it'll work, but if they try to cop out on the ending, then it won't.
Complicating things since 2009.
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Um, are we dissing the Horton Hears a Who movie? Because I actually thought that was pretty good.
Horton is a great movie bar the weird faux-anime sequence and if you stop the film just before the karaoke ending.
I don't get why these companies don't opt for making shorter versions for DVD or, if they're looking for movie revenue, a collection of three suess stories as a feature. They get the suess look well in 3D, by just lose out by stretching the story out so much.
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The worst part is that The Lorax makes a fantastic children's book but they're only using that because it's a recognizable brand. All the added characters defeat the point was trying to make. One boy. One mysterious, shadowy villain. One real voice of reason to represent the things that can't represent themselves. You keep piling more and more shit on top of that and eventually it's not the same simple story. It's a different story with some of the same characters which is a bit disingenuous because i feel like a generation of kids are going to watch this movie instead of reading the book which would have stayed with them a lot longer and had a much deeper impact than this crap that hollywood is trying to shove down people's throats.
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DePatie-Freleng made the television special of The Lorax; not Jones.
Well, I was referring to Grinch Stole Christmas, since I've actually seen and hated the movie version of it, and have to assume the same thing happened to the other adaptations, but… fair enough.
Far as this goes… eh, I dunno. The point of The Lorax is that problems created by greed and shortsightedness usually can be easily avoided and require hard work to fix if that's even possible. If they stick to that, it'll work, but if they try to cop out on the ending, then it won't.
The whole "we're cutting down the trees too fast" thing kind of lost all potency for me when I learned that, desptie what Captain Planet would have us believe, lumber yards replant more than they cut, so that they can have a reusable resource. Takes a bit of the punch out of the specific lesson… though I suppose it still applies to things like oil which ARE limited and non-renewable.
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The tone of the trailer is rather odd. The future is far more bright and happy in the film compared to the book, sort of muting the message there. Also, it's got a very strong (and very generic) light-comedy element to it that keeps me all that interested in seeing it.
@RobbyBevard:
The whole "we're cutting down the trees too fast" thing kind of lost all potency for me when I learned that, desptie what Captain Planet would have us believe, lumber yards replant more than they cut, so that they can have a reusable resource. Takes a bit of the punch out of the specific lesson… though I suppose it still applies to things like oil which ARE limited and non-renewable.
To be fair, the book was originally written, environmentalism was still a very new and hot political issue, and business practices had yet to fully regulate industries such as mining and logging, which did run risks of damaging the stability of various ecosystems through either pollution or overfishing/logging. I agree that it is less of an important lesson in the U.S. today now that most businesses are wiser to environmental concerns. I suppose it is still important in countries that continue to have limited regulation and focus on profits and production over environmentalist concerns.
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What the hell is up with the teenage love story sub-plot?
Leave Geisel's work alone, Hollywood
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@RobbyBevard:
Well, I was referring to Grinch Stole Christmas, since I've actually seen and hated the movie version of it, and have to assume the same thing happened to the other adaptations, but… fair enough.
I wouldn't mind seeing a version of The Grinch by the same people who made Horton if for no other reason than if it were good, we could pretend that the live action film never happened. If it were bad, we'd be no worse off.
The whole "we're cutting down the trees too fast" thing kind of lost all potency for me when I learned that, desptie what Captain Planet would have us believe, lumber yards replant more than they cut, so that they can have a reusable resource. Takes a bit of the punch out of the specific lesson… though I suppose it still applies to things like oil which ARE limited and non-renewable.
That wasn't always the case though; the timber industry used to be perfectly fine with clear-cutting forests and the Lorax was written in response to those policies.
We're talking about an industry that found that that the brittle nature of sequoias meant that they were useless for lumber and still spent forty years cutting them down to make fence posts, shingles, and matchsticks anyway until people got pissed off enough about it that the remaining groves were made into nature preserves. When Dr. Seuss wrote The Lorax, there was a lot of press coverage about the damage being done to the habitat range of spotted owls, which are still a threatened species four decades later, as well as to coastal redwoods.That's really the major problem with the logging industry; sure, they plant more than enough trees to replace those that they cut down, but they mostly plant them in locations where it is easy to harvest them when they mature, which doesn't even begin to repair the damage done to the ecosystem by cutting down trees in the wilderness. The Lorax wasn't just about the truffula trees, but also the animals that needed them to survive and that had to migrate elsewhere because of disease and starvation resulting from cutting them down.
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You know, with all this talk of how they're messing up this adaptation of Dr. Seuss' work, perhaps we need to consider that adapting Dr. Seuss books into film just isn't a good idea to begin with.
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I think Dr. Suess books are best made into short, animated tv specials rather than full-length movies, if the Grinch is anything to go by.
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I'm ambivalent toward this. The Lorax is my favourite Seuss book because it had a strong conservation message, and apparently that message is receiving second billing to a romance between Zac Efron and Taylor Swift. The impression I'm getting is that there's resistance to replanting the forests by the corporate dude, who might be the son of the hermit Once-ler, but I can't understand the motivation in wanting to prevent that from happening. It detaches Geisel's prescription of action from the ill-desired consequences, and is instead processing a contrived happy end with tacked on romance/adventure/adversity. Where did the responsibility go?
DeVito as The Lorax. Hated the idea at first, still haven't warmed up to his voice. He's too much in character as "DeVito", like how Adam Sandler and Larry the Cable Guy are permanently in character. I think DeVito could pull off a serious, avuncular performance but he's obviously not taking that approach here.
This is out of character for me, but I'm all about ready to condemn this movie. It's light-years from Battleship bad, but Battleship took a board game with no plot and gave it a sucky one. This movie is taking a good children's book and hewing away the intelligence, only to digest and regurgitate it in a mass-consumption form. Like Ubiq said, even if the message is maybe slightly archaic, it's no less salient to any post-IR era.
Was Horton really bad? I never saw it, but I'm getting mixed signals here and abroad.
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I haven't watched a trailer for it since Arthur Christmas, but my inclination after seeing it on the bigscreen is that the image of the Once-Ler that we're seeing during the sequences shown in the trailer is an image created by the kid who is listening to the story being told rather than what the Once-Ler actually looks like. He doesn't know what the speaker looks like and is picturing himself in the role.
If nothing else, we catch a glimpse of an arm that emerges from the Once-Ler's house that doesn't square with what we're seeing in the rest of the trailer.
Complicating things since 2009.
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I haven't watched a trailer for it since Arthur Christmas, but my inclination after seeing it on the bigscreen is that the image of the Once-Ler that we're seeing during the sequences shown in the trailer is an image created by the kid who is listening to the story being told rather than what the Once-Ler actually looks like. He doesn't know what the speaker looks like and is picturing himself in the role.
If nothing else, we catch a glimpse of an arm that emerges from the Once-Ler's house that doesn't square with what we're seeing in the rest of the trailer.
Unfortunately, this is not the case.
Now I finally got a chance to see the movie yesterday, and, no surprise here, it was pretty mediocre. It wasn't bad, just very low grade and subpar-ish.
Although I will say, as an adaptation, this movie is a failure. But if it was an original film, it would have been alright. The whole message of the original book is completely watered down. And the ending…...oh, boy. It was almost exactly like I predicted it would be.
I'm sure most kids (and those who've never read the book) will probably enjoy it, but adults who've read the book when they were young will be pretty disappointed.
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I've heard this line of complaint a lot about this movie and I couldn't disagree more.
The film isn't just an adaption of the book, but also a commentary on how it was received by the public when it came out. This is most easily seen towards the end with one scene in particular standing out.
! Namely the one where the people actually see the world around them for the first time; the notion that people who actually take the time to look at the effects of their lifestyle on the environment are utterly horrified by what they see and what to change things is pretty much exactly what happened because of the book. That's the entire point of the kid responsible for this transformation in the way people look at things being named after Dr. Seuss after all.
Far as the message goes, as is, The Lorax of the book is primarily a nag that constantly admonished the Once-Ler, most often after the fact, and the tone of the book isn't really that we can fix the damage that we have done, but only avoid doing more. The fact that this isn't so was recognized by Dr. Seuss himself as he deleted the original line "I hear things are almost as bad up at Lake Erie" after clean up projects for that body of water proved successful. Beyond being remorseful for his actions, the Once-Ler is also fairly useless since he has the power to do something, but chooses not to. In the film, that makes a bit more sense since he has an actual connection to the Lorax beyond merely ignoring the latter whenever he shows up to feebly complain about the situation like his literary equivalent does. The Once-Ler of the book merely feels somewhat bad about what he did to the trees, but that's it as there's nothing more for him to feel bad about. The film is conveying the idea that environmentalism isn't just not doing something, but taking positive steps to fix what you have done wrong, which is important.
