LORAX movie coming

Dr. Seuss' 1971 environmentalist fable The Lorax is one of this beloved author's most deeply-felt works, and also one of his most controversial. (Yes, there are actually people out there who take issue with the book's message that chopping down all the trees and filling the seas with sludge is bad.)

Now the book is coming to the big screen as a CGI cartoon, with Horton Hears a Who veterans Chris Renaud, Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio co-directing and Paul and Daurio co-writing.

Like most of Seuss' work, The Lorax is a very short, clearly defined story. There's simply not enough plot there to support a two-hour movie, so the script will probably require the same kind of padding they used for Horton, with new plot threads and lots of shtick. But Horton at least had characters and situations that lent themselves to a little expansion. The Lorax features the narrator - an industrialist who remains unseen throughout the story - destroying the forest despite the repeated warnings of the Lorax, and that's really all the characters and plot you've got.

Seuss' work has suffered through some truly horrid adaptations in recent years. I thought The Grinch was just about as crappy as a movie could get, but then I saw a few minutes of the Mike Meyers version of The Cat In the Hat playing on the monitor in a Blockbuster, and it traumatized me so much that sometimes I still wake up in a cold sweat, muttering about Meyer's terrifying kitty-face.

Horton Hears a Who scored comparatively well on the suckometer, in the sense that it didn't make you want to run screaming at the movie screen with a big ax and keep hacking and chopping until you broke through to the parking lot. I'm going to cross my fingers and hope for the best for The Lorax. (Of course, given that Daurio and Paul's previous screenplay credits include something called Walter the Farting Dog, there is a very real risk that their Lorax script will actually be worse than Meyers' Cat In the Hat.)

The book was previously adapted into a faithful if no-frills TV special in 1972. You can watch it below.



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