The Kind of Tale Everybody Thneeds?: Ecocriticism, Class, and the Filmic Lorax

The 2012 film Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax makes explicit its desire to not just adapt but to “bigger” Seuss’s eco-fable. This narrative expansion advocates community-based action and promotes a more ecocentric consciousness while simultaneously and retrogressively particularizing the source of environmental destruction presented by the book. By narratively and visually coding the environmental threat as working class and individualized, this movie channels eco-activism away from the powerful. Further, moving outward to the film’s larger cultural context, the movie’s marketing tie-ins facilitate the unraveling of the very group-based activism that the narrative endorses, re-individualizing environmental change as merely “Lorax-approved” consumption-as-usual.