DVD Reviews

Kids’ View Review: The Lorax

By Tanner D. Luce (13 Years Old) Aug 6, 2012, 14:07 GMT

The imaginative world of Dr. Seuss comes to life like never before in this visually spectacular adventure from the creators of Despicable Me! Twelve-year-old Ted will do anything to find a real live Truffula Tree in order to impress the girl of his dreams. As he embarks on his journey, Ted discovers the incredible story of the Lorax, a grumpy but charming creature who speaks for the trees. Featuring the ...more

The Lorax started out well enough. The movie’s opening showed a nice little utopia where everything is made of plastic. It was an intro that got my attention. A catchy musical number with shiny HD plastic trees and smooth animations (an inflatable bush blows up).

The air quality is terrible, but they get around it by buying fresh air. If any other movie had mentioned buying fresh air, I would go and get a refund. It is just an incredibly stupid that would not fit in any movie but this. It all makes perfect sense. 

The movie actually takes place after the events of The Lorax book, where the air quality is poor. A guy named O’ Hare came up with a solution to sell air and becomes a billionaire. He makes everything out of plastic (creating smog) so that people have no choice but to buy air.

The intro was quite good and really memorable. I cannot say the same for the rest of the movie. A boy named Ted wants to get this girl a tree. O’ Hare gets mad because trees make air which will mess up his business.

The only person who has a tree lives outside of the town, and happens to be the main character in The Lorax book. He tells Ted the story of what happened. The only real entertainment in this part came from cute dancing bears and fish that sang the Mission Impossible theme. Other than that it was mostly songs.

I was a little disappointed because the original 70s movie did a lot better job showing what was going on. In the original the Once-ler guy spent most of his time describing his progress, saying things like “Now I can chop down lots of trees with this vehicle” and “I’ve sold 1 million! Please, please, I speak for man!”

In this movie it was just a rock song. Afterwards the Once-ler gives Ted a seed and the whole thing becomes a rip off of Wall-e. Does O’ Hare chasing Ted to get the seed sound kind of like robots chasing Eve to get a seed? The visuals are not interesting.

The people’s rendering looks like it came right out of 2007. Some of the stuff like trees and rivers, and animals looked nice, but that was about it.

The soundtrack is worth having, it is nice enough to where kids will enjoy it and adults will not flee the room. I wish they had not put in so many songs and put more focus into the other areas. The Blu-ray includes three mini-movies that are fun, but not good enough to make me change my mind about the movie.

Overall, the Lorax was not half bad.  The plot did not interest me as much as 1970 cartoon did, but it did have laughs. It started good but then went downhill. A lot of movies are better than this.

It came out right after The Hunger Games and maybe Avengers and right before Madagascar 3 and Ice Age. I’d give it three stars. It really needed some polish, or it was just bad timing to release it in the middle of high budget blockbusters.

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