Boring Lorax Does Green Message No Favors

The Lorax may have a sound environmental message, but it's lost in a subpar movie that warps Dr. Seuss' original sentiment. One critic found the movie so vile he was inspired to write a Seuss-esque poem of his own:

• "There’s no fun in The Lorax, no joy in its theme / It’s as boring as sales tax / I’m ready to ream," writes Kyle Smith in the New York Post. "The Lorax stands small as a hectoring runt / Even Al Gore’s ax was never so blunt." As for the songs: "You’ll forget them before this young March hits the ides / I have heard better tunes on Clay Aiken’s B-sides."

• In a more conventional New York Times review, AO Scott notes that "despite its soft environmentalist message, the Lorax is an example of what it pretends to oppose ... The movie is a noisy, useless piece of junk, reverse-engineered into something resembling popular art in accordance with the reigning imperatives of marketing and brand extension."
• "Although it keeps intact the ecological message of one of the original tree-hugger books," notes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times, it "adds a whole lot of other stuff, most of it not very good and not in keeping with the spirit of the Seuss original."
• "With its cotton-candy-colored palette of orange, pink, and purple truffula trees, it looks like a bowl of fuzzy Froot Loops. But it goes down like an order of oatmeal," writes Michael O'Sullivan in the Washington Post. "Sure, it's good for you. It's just not terribly good."

(More The Lorax stories.)