A travesty.

Now, I'm sure some children and parents liked the movie. I didn't, but that's a matter of taste.

I hope most of us can agree that we don't like what the movie represents: leveraging a popular children's story's notoriety as a marketing gimmick.

Now, I understand that the Lorax would've been a challenge to convert to film. It's dark. It's morbid. It's told almost entirely from the third person, and it has no clear protagonist. However, that's the story, and if you don't have the guts to tell the story, then don't make the film. if you're going to abandon the story, just make an original film. Don't drag the book down with you.

This movie borrows the names and likenesses of a couple of the characters to tell a completely different story: a cookie-cutter 5 act that manages to entirely betray the sentiments of the book.

It will probably be another 25 years before they make another film adaptation of the Lorax, and it's such a waste that they chose to squander this one on such a timid, homogenized, imitation.

Anyway, I'm sure many of you liked the movie, and that's fine. But this movie existing means that "The Lorax" as it should have been will not be made, and that's a tragedy.

It's like the producers of batman thought it was too dark, and opted to make it about a literal bat-man human bat hybrid, and filled it up with jokes about sleeping upside down and eating insects. If you're not going to tell the story, don't bother basing your movie on the book.