The Lorax Is An Accidental Adaptation Of The Giver

The Lorax is an accidental adaptation of The Giver

I wondered what was bothering me about the movie the Lorax. It’s not just the completely obliterated environmental messages that were grossly mishandled, or the downright creepy “love story” between Audrey and Ted (seriously nasty). It dawned on me that the Lorax is actually a more faithful adaptation of the Giver than the actual movie that was recently adapted.

For those who don’t know the book the Giver, it’s about a twelve year old child named Jonas who lives in an isolated community in the future, where everything is controlled. No one chooses their partners, they are suppressed emotionally, and jobs are assigned at the age of twelve. When Jonas is given the job of the Giver, he is assigned to the most recent Giver, an old man who shows how things used to be. 

Now, the recent Giver movie is…terrible. It tried to cash in on the recent dystopia craze and took the quiet, creepy elements of the original book to make Hunger Games 2.0. 

The Lorax, by sheer coincidence, is an unintentionally faithful adaptation of the Giver. 

We have a twelve year old boy 

With a crush on a red headed girl 

Who goes to an old man who lives in isolation

Who tells him through flashbacks how the world used to be before the corruption of society 

In both the Lorax and the Giver, the society the characters live in is very isolated. People have no interest in leaving, and the world outside the city is desolate and full of dangers that the protagonist isn’t aware of until later.

It’s really weird how it came out. I’m not a fan of the Lorax movie from 2012, but it really says something when a movie that completely missed the point (and is hypocritical as hell) is still a more faithful adaptation of a source material that also tried to cash in on recent trends.