In more Dr. Seuss movie news, The Lorax film adaptation seems to be coming along swimmingly--perhaps even better than one might expect from yet another full-length adaptation of a picture book. Entertainment Weekly has some new images of the film's iconic characters, and I gotta say, they look pretty alright.

We all know what the Lorax is supposed to look like and his 3D rendition isn't too far removed from Seuss's hand-drawn original. Some CGI takes on kids' books will endow their source imagery with an unnatural sense of space. It's weird to see a line drawing suddenly transported into the third dimension, and if done poorly, it can look outright creepy. But the Lorax himself seems to be rendered pretty gently. He's not harshly polygonal; he looks soft and warmly textured. So does his surrounding environment. He looks like he's going to get to stay a cartoon, more or less. 

EW even has shots of the Once-ler, the story's faceless narrator who recalls how his own ambition destroyed a lush past. In the book, he hides behind a boarded-up window, only recounting his tale to those who pay the toll. Even in the flashback scenes, he never appears as more than a pair of green hands. But this is cinema, and it's generally useful to be able to show full-body shots of your protagonists, so the creative team behind Lorax had to come up with a character design for the once-mysterious Once-ler. I don't think he was meant to be entirely human in the book--those long, green arms suggest otherwise--but he's been turned into a regular dude in order to make him a more relatable character. He does wear green gloves throughout as a nod to the original design. And he even dons a dapper fedora. In fact, the young Once-ler looks a great deal like the hipsters of today.

Which stays true, I suppose, to the point of the original book--each and every one of us is responsible for the fate of the planet. Abuse it to our own ends and we'll ruin it. Putting a face on the Once-ler makes him into more of a mirror, a warning sign to the destructiveness of our own habits. The Lorax was never ambiguous in its intent, and I'm glad the film is taking the same route.

These new shots have actually made me less skeptical about the project as a whole. The Lorax brings with it some fantastic imagery, as well as a tangible plot, and it might be great to see it up on the big screen. Besides, we need people thinking about the future of the trees now more than ever.