Has 'The Lorax' trapped you?

Since its publication in 1971 ‘The Lorax’, by Dr Seuss, has occasionally been caught up in squalls of controversy.

Thematically, the recently-released movie dutifully lectures its audience on the folly of overconsumption and the virtue of conservation.

At times the imagery takes on a dark cast as it surveys the smogged-up, denuded landscape where the trees used to be and the shiny, commercialised pseudo-utopia (called Thneedville) that an alienated humanity, having lost the memory of nature, now calls home.

Don’t be fooled. Despite its soft environmentalist message, ‘The Lorax’ is an example of what it pretends to oppose. Its relationship to Dr Seuss’s book is precisely that of the synthetic trees that line the streets of Thneedville to the organic Truffulas they have displaced!

‘The Lorax’ tells parallel stories, one about a young boy named Ted (Zac Efron), who in order to impress a girl sets out to find an actual, living tree. He ventures over the metal wall that encloses Thneedville and finds the Once-ler (Ed Helms), a hermit who tells the tale of his own encounter with the cranky orange Lorax (Danny DeVito).

In the film as in the book, the Once-ler ravages the landscape and destroys the Truffula trees to manufacture ‘thneeds’, knitted garments that have multiple uses but no real utility.

Demand for them is insatiable for a while, and then, once the trees are gone, the thneeds are forgotten, partly because nobody really needed them in the first place.

There is an obvious metaphor here, but the movie is blind to it, and to everything else that is interesting or true in the story it tries to tell.