$5 Tuesdays: "The Lorax"

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I've always been a fan of animated films and the recent offerings from the major studios just keep getting better and better, except for Happy Feet 2; that was a load of crap.  I'm a firm believer that animated films are just as much, if not more, for adults than kids, especially with recent movies chock-full of witty humor and pop culture references that no child would ever understand.  But a lot of parents still view an animated movie as a one and a half hour baby sitter, and in an effort to avoid a theater full of screaming babies and wild kids running amuck, I decided to attend a super-late showing of this week's $5 Tuesday movie, Dr. Seuss' The Lorax.
 


Even though I chose the absolute last screening of the day, the 10:10 pm showing of The Lorax on a school night still wasn't late enough to avoid a noisy theater as a family with a handful of kids and an infant in a baby carrier plopped down behind me.  Luckily the kids stayed relatively quiet while the infant fell asleep in the carrier, and I was able to the enjoy the perfect and entirely manufactured world that Dr. Seuss created.

 The Lorax was a cleverly disguised social commentary that touched upon society's greed, a corporation's constant drive for more profit, even at the cost of the environment, and our ever increasing dependency on manufactured goods.  The movie is set in a world where people basically lived in a bio-dome in which everything from the grass to the bugs are artificial and the richest person in town is a guy who sells bottled air.  Drop in a boy fueled by his love for a girl and his quest to find a real Truffula tree and you've got a whimsical adventure with a couple of hilarious musical numbers.

I'm always amazed by the attention to detail in modern CG animated films and can't even begin to comprehend the amount of effort that was put in to animating even the small strands of fuzz on grandma's sweater.  I often caught myself staring at the tiniest of details thinking to myself, "wow, someone thought of and created that".  Dr. Seuss' worlds never have any straight lines and the artists of The Lorax did a great job in keeping true to form with each vehicle and building wackier and curvier than the one before.

Was The Lorax worth $5?   Definitely.  Granted the story of a greedy company pilfering the land until it's barren is a bit cliched, but I'm a sucker for furry animated creatures and silly antics.

Watch it on the big screen or rent?   This one could go either way, but I'd recommend watching it on the big screen to really appreciate all of the detail that the animators worked so hard to put into the film.

Read up on last week's $5 Tuesday: Act Of Valor

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