Miff-muffered Moof

I was scrolling imdb the other day and I stumbled across this gem:

Some might say I have a minor infatuation with the Lorax, but it's not my fault.  It all started a long, long way back when I was an outdoor education instructor at the Blue Ridge Outdoor Education Center. I had always liked the Lorax, but when I started sharing it with my students, I started to love the Lorax.  From then on, I carried a copy with me everywhere. As an instructor at Wolverine Camps in Northern Michigan, we would put on elaborate productions, and I would always narrate. I read it so many times, that now I pretty much have it memorized. Every once and a while now, I can be caught reciting it to my future nephews, and I have no doubt that this will be the first book I read to my kids. 

To be blunt, I'm not sure how I feel about a Lorax movie. They've changed the basic premise to a love story. Our doe-eyed boy who stumbles down the Street of Lifted Lorax is there because he wants to get a tree to impress a girl. Apparently, they live in a world completely devoid of real nature, and they're stuck with highly polished artificial nature, a simulacrum of paradise. Therefore, there is no other reason to go seeking "nature" besides a girl. In a world so vividly clean and suburban, who would want real nature mucking up the pristine, manufacture landscape. This to me is the biggest break and my biggest worry about this movie. Seuss, on the first page, paints a picture of a wasteland. One haggard Swomee-Swan hangs in the air and a few twigs stand are limply scattered across the hillside. This is no paradise. 

To me this perverts the entire message of the Lorax. It's not about staying true to the book in a strict sense, but it is about staying true to the message. The message is UNLESS you care about the environment, it will be destroyed. It's hard to see how living in a suburban world where nature is artificially reproduced would ever cause people to "care a whole awful lot." It's not something you can buy in a store; it's not something that can be manufactured. It's not even really something that you can buy with fifteen cents, and a nail, and the shell of a great, great, great grandfather snail. It's about stewardship stupid.