People too often forget that intelligence cannot be taught. It’s something you are born with. When we attend school, the goal is to become educated, not to become intelligent. There is a distinction. And it is exactly this notion that people often forget when dealing with children. It is widely considered, although not often said, that young children are somehow “dumb.” However, this is simply not true.
But it is with this notion in mind that mediocre children’s fare is too often allowed to bypass criticism. There is a general lack of credence when it comes to children’s movies. People are so quick to quip, “I’m sure the kids will like it. Kids like anything.” Sure, kids endure anything. And they are certainly less jaded and bitter than the rest of us. They are likely more awed by the sheer spectacle of film, something adults have grown to take for granted. But kids are not dumb, and quality still resonates with them.
I was reminded of this while watching the new film, The Lorax. Not to say the film is bad or condescending to its audience, but I was struck during one of the many hackneyed musical interludes that the film was unnecessarily cluttered with. The filmmakers seemed to assume that children enjoy musical numbers, no matter how uninspired they may be. But as I stated earlier, children, and for that matter the parents accompanying them, are not akin to a kitten playing with a ball of yarn. If something is to entertain them, then it must first be entertaining; which the musical song-and-dance numbers in The Lorax were anything but. They all felt inorganic, forced, and unenthusiastically slapped together with the enduring precipice that it really wouldn’t matter, because kids just aren’t astute enough to critique movies anyway.
And maybe that is the real problem. Much like school cafeteria food, it’s not that kids don’t want to eat better food and be healthier; they just don’t know how to express that into words. Adults are able to effectively articulate exactly why they don’t like certain movies. Kids don’t have that ability or that platform.
This relates to the musical numbers in The Lorax, because it wasn’t immediately apparent or easy to determine what exactly was wrong with them. But I was reminded of the great musical cartoons like Aladdin and The Lion King, and the songs that still to this day we can probably all recite word for word. I couldn’t imagine anyone singing along or reciting the words to any of the songs in The Lorax. And that is indicative of the film as a whole.
The Lorax was created by the people that made Despicable Me, and just as that film (despite being clever and funny in its own right) paled in comparison to the similarly themed Megamind; so too does The Lorax pale next to the previous Dr. Seuss interpretation Horton Hears a Who.
The Lorax, inspired by the book of the same name, has a clever premise. The title character is a creature that “speaks for the trees,” sort of like their publicist, or perhaps more like a mustached Al Gore. The message of the film is to respect nature, not mine it for profit, because the world’s resources are not endless. If we don’t respect that, then it will catch up to us. We will run out of oil. We will run out of clean water. What then? The Lorax surmises it is better to live with nature than to conquer it.
One would think this message would be an obvious and sensible one, but not so, according to conservative, right-wing pundits. Lou Dobbs and a host of others have already come out and labeled the film liberal propaganda and accused the left of indoctrinating the youth. Because let’s face it, acid wasn’t the inspiration behind the inane musings of Dr. Seuss; it was actually a rather calculated scheme to convert America to Socialism. And really what better method to use as propaganda than rhyming limericks and senseless poetry?
Ironically, the film doesn’t even make a convincing argument for its message. In the film, they live in a world where there is no fresh air and you have to buy air by the bottle. And yet everyone seems to be generally happy and the air appears rather clean. The urgency and motivation behind saving trees seems vapid in such a scenario. Had the movie instead been set in a hazy, smoggy world where you wouldn’t dare go outside for fear of breathing the toxic “air,” then the message may have been more persuasive. As it is now, the movie’s message is only credible because it is so palpable; that is unless of course, you’re a conservative pundit.
