THEY SHOW US THE ONCE-LER IN THE GOD DAMN PREVIEW!
Why would this upset me so?
First off, I can't read this story to my children without choking up a little remembering my mother reading it to me. I had so much fun just imagining what the Once-ler might look like. The mystery of the Once-ler's appearance made the character really, really engaging and got me asking how can he be doing this bad stuff when he's so smart. Look what he can do, what he can create, the cool stuff he can invent like the super-axe hacker. Why isn't he listening the the Lorax?
I identified more with the Once-ler than the kid in the story, partially because I saw what the kid looked like. He was just some run of the mill curious kid.
I learned a great deal about obsession, ethics and responsibility from the Once-ler's mistakes. The Once-ler is Howard Hughes, Orson Welles, Preston Tucker, Victor Frankstein, not some lanky-looking teenager!
To be clear, this upcoming movie might be cute, but that the producers failed to recognize the perfection of the source material's ambiguity and brevity is a sad irony in itself. I'll spell it out. As I understand the point of The Lorax is don't do stuff to excess just to make money and just because you can. So the filmmakers take a short story, expand it into a full length movie with big-budget computer animation because they can and because they hope it's going to make a shit load of money.
Yup, that's cynical, but that doesn't mean it's incorrect.
No, I don't think the film makers had bad intentions and in the end children will probably still get a positive message from the movie - whatever that means I just couldn't say.
