The Lorax coming to the big screen
News is out that Universal Pictures and Illumination Entertainment are joining forces to produce a new 3-D version of the Dr. Seuss classic The Lorax(warning: loud circusy music on that link!). From Variety:
"Though published in 1971, "The Lorax" has a timely "green" theme. It is narrated by a greedy entrepreneur who, despite warnings from the tree-loving Lorax, strips a forest of its stock of Truffula trees to manufacture clothing. The results are catastrophic as all the animals leave and nothing's left."
I loved that book, and it's true that the green theme was before it's time. With ever-increasing fears about global warming and environmental impacts the message of this book rings really true. "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better, it's just not."
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Please, please, pleasepleaseplease just don't let Mike Myers or Jim Carrey within spitting distance of this.
Agreed! this is my favorite book of all time, and i'd really prefer it didn't turn into some creepy circus show full of thinly veiled sex jokes!
Actually, the green theme of The Lorax was not before its time. There was a huge upsurge in environmental consciousness in the 60s-early 70s, following such events as the publication of Silent Spring in 1962, passage of the Clean Air Act in 1963, and the Cuyahoga River catching fire in 1969.
http://www.runet.edu/~wkovarik/envhist/8sixties.html
http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/entry.php?rec=1642
I can't wait! I got this book for my children, and it's brought about excellent conversations about business, greed, and the environment.
This is a wonderful book. It was one of my favorites and my children have a copy too. We also have the cartoon made in the 1970's on video tape. I think it is a good introduction to teaching children how interconnected the world is.
I think that Dr. Seuss's books had a lot of themes related to improvement for society and the environment. Horton Hears a Who "a person is a person no matter how small" and the Sneeches "Sneetches are Sneetches and no kind of Sneetch is the best on the beaches."
And anti-war messages in The Butter Battle Book!
He may just be the most subversive liberal author for tots ever.
I remember doing an interpretive reading of this for a talent show or something...hope it'll turn out well.
For the grown-up-and-dry version, try Jared Diamond's Collapse. I'm reading now about how the people of Easter Island destroyed their environment, and the point is incredibly obvious and creepy. They were so stupid, just like us.
They should have former Ambassador to the UN John Bolton play the Lorax. They have a striking resemblance, no?
Walrus bears can be used for good or for evil. Bolton would be the guy in BBB demanding that the bombs be dropped.
I was actually thinking this would be the perfect part for Wilford Brimley... but he's also a serious right-winger (he was McCain's celeb-endorsement answer to Chuck Norris for Huckabee, if I recall) so I think he'd be about as likely to participate as John Bolton would be.
There is actually no "just" in the quote from the book. It's just (ha ha) "nothing is going to get better, it's not".
Actually Dr. Seuss had two better enviro-books: THE KING'S STILTS and BARTHOLEMEW AND THE OOBLECK. STILTS teaches near-professional ecology to read-to-me kids--remember the problem was Lord Droon wouldn't let the King play on stilts, so the King was too depressed to organize and rally the Patrol Cats to stop the nizzards from eating the roots of the dyke-trees which kept the water out of the low-lying land. The cascade of causes. And OOBLECK was a funny and terrifying enumeration of the victims of a climate-disaster--trumpeters, soldiers, cooks, laundresses, everybody.
Either of these would be much better than THE LORAX which is preachy and dull. Unlike LORAX, they tell STORIES, with PLOTS, and changes in the dramatic intensity.
We watched the original cartoon version of this in my environmental science class a few years ago and I really liked it...I hope the new one will be just as good.
Hi--I really like this community, and only recently did I realize readers could post. Yay!
Reading The Lorax as an adult, I don't draw the same environmental stewardship messages from the text as I did when I was a kid. I see the book now as an indictment of industrialization and nepotism. The Lorax, as a character, is a whistle-blower, not a community activist. I'm also more cynical as an adult by celebrations of rugged individualism as the catalyst for change in children's books.
Along that vein of individualism, I'm curious how/if at all this book will be co-opted by Hollywood. Probably along the axis of solidifying imagery of environmentalists as white and wealthy or highly educated. Other predictions?