All Critics (117)
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Top Critics (27)
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Fresh (65)
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Rotten (52)
The gorgeous and glorious new film of this fable from Universal's Despicable Me team turns a somewhat gloomy, cautionary tale into a 3-D musical, with catchy tunes and gags borrowed from every film from Toy Story to Babe.
May be a diversion for younger children, but it betrays the elegant simplicity of Geisel's vision.
Director Chris Renaud and his team have fun with these dithery, frenetic characters. The film is less special when it slows down and takes a breath of fresh air.
This tale is filled with delightful characters and it's sugarcoated with vibrant animation and candy colors.
The badness of the picture is a shock.
Par for the course in blowout CGI adaptations, a great deal of detail and bustle is gained at the expense of charm-for all the miracles these armies of animators can achieve, they have yet to successfully reproduce a humble artist's line.
And just to make all this Hollywoodization--this snappy, fizzy, poppy enviro-libation, sugar-coated for the ADD-kid generation--even more delicious to swallow, well, the look of it all seems oddly plastic and hollow.
For all its good intentions, there's something deeply unsettling about this bubblegum pop approach to environmentalism.
It's nice to see Seuss on the loose on the big screen again.
The Lorax wants so much to be adorable that it loses sight of its stated messages; the film feels synthetic and lacks the conviction of the source material.
The heavy handed, hypocritical propaganda hits too many false notes to care two 'truffulas' about.
There's just something missing in translation from that most powerful book.
Despite being blatant enviro-tainment, it's a win for the world if the stories of Dr Seuss are still being told. The film has its heart in the right place and might get children into the garden for some manual labour.
Mindless fun isn't exactly what I was hoping for with 'The Lorax,' but that's what you get.
There are only a few laughs and the characters aren't that exciting. I much preferred Kung Fu Panda will all its action and fighting.
The new narrative, with its cloying song numbers and an ending lifted from Wall-E, turns Seuss' serious yet still somewhat subtle pro-environmental message into a heavy-handed corporate screed.
Apart from its message about the dangers of greed and the threat to the fragile environment, it doesn't aim very high visually or technically. But it's entertaining, colourful -- and it doesn't overstay its welcome.
The Lorax is perfectly pitched for children. But for adults, and especially fans of the book, the glossiness and clunky songs are a bit too much to take, and ironically give a synthetic feel to a story that preaches the opposite.
Given its inevitable merchandise tie-ins, this animated eco-preachy affair carries with it more than a whiff of questionable intent.
The 3D-CG work is exceptional, down to the hairy edges of the Thneed, a sort of multi-functional scarf affair in orange, made from the Thneed trees, which have orange fairy floss for foliage.
Multi-coloured trees resembling fairy floss are the focus of this inventively funny, eco-friendly 3D animated confection ... a hilarious, uplifting, inventive and wonderful film for all ages
The movie today projects the story's theme through a prism of even timelier contemporary woes of failed banks, corporate fat cats and the general feeling that the "green" is being squeezed out of most everyone left and right.
Given the extent to which it perverts Theodor Geisel's classic children's book, Dr. Seuss' The Lorax might as well be named J.K. Rowling's The Lorax or F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Lorax or even Jane Austen's The Lorax.
Directors Chris Renaud and Kyle Balda have filled every scene with funny-looking (or sounding) characters, sight gags, and one-liners to provide constant distraction.
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