rob riggle

He is the Lorax, he speaks for the trees – or at least he would, if he could get a word in edgewise. Because Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax, as directed by Chris Renaud and Kyle Balda, is so cluttered — with extra narrative, extra characters, extra everything — that its famously mossy and bossy central figure barely figures into the plot. More a bowdlerization than an adaptation of the great Theodor Geisel’s somber plea for environmental preservation, The Lorax is so big, flashy and redundant that it courts precisely the kind of blind consumerism it’s supposed to be condemning. It doesn’t trust kids to sit still and pay attention for even a minute.

In the book, a young boy approaches the dark lair of the Once-ler, situated in the middle of a bare wasteland. The Once-ler spins a tale about what this godforsaken patch of land used to be like: It was dotted lavishly with Truffula Trees, their tufty heads looking like psychedelic dandelions and smelling of “butterfly milk.” This was a land populated by humming fish and bearlike creatures known as Bar-ba-Loots (“frisking about in their Bar-ba-Loot suits”), and guarded over by the stern, if noodgy, Lorax, who is especially protective of the area’s chief natural resource, those Truffula Trees. The Once-ler begins cutting down the trees for his own gain, initiating a destructive spiral that the book resolves only tentatively – with a single Truffula seed held out as a symbol of hope for the future.

Those simple but potent ingredients aren’t enough for this Lorax, which was adapted – maybe “mauled” is the better word – by Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul. The boy who sets the whole story in motion is a pre-teener named Ted (voiced by Zac Efron), who lives in Thneedville, a…