The Lorax (2012)

It has been forty years since a children's book about a mustachioed forest guardian first informed American youth that their elders were ruining the planet, and the 2012 adaptation arrives with the same sermon in a brighter wrapper. The Lorax concerns Thneedville, a walled city where the trees are plastic and the air is bottled and sold by a diminutive mayor named O'Hare. The film takes the deforestation of the source material and renders it as a full environmental parable: a barren wasteland beyond the walls, a contaminated sky, a corporate villain who profits from the absence of nature. The climate concern here is not subtext. It is the plot.

The economic critique runs alongside it with matching enthusiasm. O'Hare's business model, selling fresh air back to citizens who have no alternative, is a tidy cartoon of monopoly and manufactured scarcity. The Once-ler's descent from humble inventor to mass producer carries the standard warning about unchecked growth, and his grasping relatives arrive as a chorus of consumption. The film was, of course, subsequently used to sell Mazda SUVs and disposable diapers, a partnership the studio defended without visible irony. The market absorbs all sermons eventually.

For all its earnestness, the film preaches to children, and it keeps the lesson soft. The moral lands in a closing line about caring a whole awful lot, and the crowd turns on the villain with a cheer. Nothing here reaches for the identity politics or social grievance that would come to mark a later era of family entertainment. The women exist to be admired or to fret. The voice cast is white and unremarked upon. The film wants us to plant a tree, not to reconsider ourselves. That is a narrower ambition, and in its own modest way, a more coherent one.