Hollywood, You Have to Leave Dr. Seuss Alone Now

There’s a lot to like in children’s cinema at the moment. Dreamworks have moved far beyond being a poor cousin to Pixar, who themselves continue to go from strength to strength but even under current circumstances there’s an ever reliable influx of shitty CGI afterthoughts being squirted out on a monthly bases like purged boils. This summer we have The Nut Job and The House of Magic to cringe forward to, two barely imagined, barely animated cash-grabs starring whichever celebrities happened to have a weekend free when the producers elbowed their way into the recording studio.

Even that is a breath of agreeably stale air compared to another, far worse recent trend. Not content with merely farting out another manipulative, dead-eyed animated creature to placate the masses every time the big barrel full of amphetamines in the corner of the office runs dry, certain studios have taken to the habit of dredging up beloved literature from my childhood, reanimating it and making it dance to Gangnam Style. No author has suffered a worse brunt from this than Dr. Seuss.

Theodore Seuss Geisel, the much loved children’s author that brought us The Cat in the Hat, How the Grinch Stole Christmas and taught us all keep check our toothbrushes for noothgrushes did actually live to witness some excellent, charming animated adaptations of his films, mostly spearheaded by Chuck Jones, the wonderful man who helped bring Tom and Jerry to life. After his death in 1991 the rights to his films passed to his widow, Audrey, who has been selling off the film rights to them one by one for the past 14 years, the first of these was Universal and Ron Howard’s ghastly attempt to turn Jim Carrey into the Grinch. This 2000 live-action disaster has somehow even now refused to fade into obscurity, although it remains best known for transforming the Whos from endearing, impish townsfolk to freakish abominations that crawled out of the 7th dimension of the uncanny nightmaresphere.

The worst thing about The Grinch though is that it’s not even close to the worst Seuss movie. At the very least it maintained some level of faith to the spirit of the story, but now I find out that they’re making it again. Another adaptation of the book is slated for a 2017 release and I imagine they’ll ruin it even harder this time around. However creepy and wrong-footed the 2000 version was, you do get some vague notion that they did try to do the book justice. Despite how mangled the soul is, it’s still in there. The more recent Seuss films don’t even have the soul, it was siphoned out, beaten flat and cut into crisp dollar bills before our very eyes, as evidenced by the next Seuss book to be picked up, The Cat in the Hat.

As a child this was one of my favorite stories, a delightfully whimsical tale of two bored children, a mysterious stranger and a surprisingly resonant moral about responsibility. What Brian Grazer, Bo Welch and Universal did to it in 2003 should be reviewed by the Geneva Convention. Jim Carrey’s Grinch certainly didn’t look right but Mike Myers’ Cat in the Hat was not the Cat in the Hat. I don’t know what it was, it blundered around spouting wildly misjudged pop-culture references and sexual innuendo (yes, really). It’s not even a film, it’s a hideous mutant apparition of shameless pandering. It probably had a power-point presentation instead of a screenplay. There’s a telling moment at around the half-way mark when the pitiful creature Mike Myers is failing to enliven turns to camera, holds up a brochure and advertises Universal Studios directly to the audience. I am not fucking kidding. One of my fondest memories of The Cat in the Hat is that it once made me laugh milk through my nose. The only thing this monstrosity of a film could ever hope to do to equate that is make me scream formic acid through my eyes. It is one of the worst films ever made and I do not understand what Seuss did to deserve it.

Somehow though, it actually kept on getting worse. At the very least the films that followed moved from live-action to CG, so the horrifying attempts to replicated Seuss’s art with makeup ceased. Horton Hears a Who and The Lorax were a new kind of ugly though, a far worse kind. The animation in Horton at least went some way towards replicating Seuss’s famed style and it’s probably better overall that any of the others (which isn’t to say it’s any good, it’s not) but all we’re left with is instead of the obvious, honest, Emperor Palpatine style evil of the previous films, we were getting the deceptive Cersei Lannister variety, the kind that looks pretty on the outside.

Horton Hears a Who is a blithe mess of catching songs (not catchy, catching, like the bubonic plague is catching), more off-kilter pop-culture nods (there’s a MySpace reference at one stage) and the ever present knowledge that you could only ever really get about 20 minutes of narrative mileage out of the original story. Oh, Seth Rogen is in it, I feel like I should mention this. The wonderful thing about Dr. Seuss is that far from just being weird tales about wacky characters, they always had strong, significant messages fueling them, messages that these corporate afterbirths disguised as films have continually and violently sidestepped like massive evil crabs made of box office receipts and shattered dreams. And the The Lorax is the most massive and crabby of them all.

It’s one thing to miss the point, it’s another to discard the point and re-purpose the outer shell for a new purpose but to miss the point so deliberately and so completely that what you’re left with is doing the exact opposite of the original story? Well that’s what happened with The Lorax. For the unfamiliar, The Lorax is a story about a young boy who meets a disgruntled shut-in called the Once-ler in a dirty, disused part of a small town. Through flashbacks we come to understand that it had once been a green, beautiful spot but the Once-ler started chopping down trees to fuel a sought-after invention. The titular Lorax appears in the stump of a tree and explains that he speaks on their behalf and that what the Once-ler is doing is wrong. The Once-ler ignores him, pollution becomes rife, nature suffers and the resources dry up, so the Lorax leaves, with only a stone slab marked ‘unless’ behind him. Back in the present the Once-ler realises his mistake and begins to revitalise the area in the hope that it isn’t too late and that the Lorax will return.

It’s a beautiful, important tale about environmental consciousness and consequences. The film is another corporate whore, beyond that the Lorax’s image was banded around all over the place during the film’s release, in adverts up to and included atmosphere choking SUVs. That’s right, the advertising for this film actually promoted the very thing the original story was warning against. It’s the equivalent of making a plaque saying ‘save the rainforest’ out of the purified bones of an orangutan and lacquering it with palm oil. Poor Geisel must be spinning in his grave.

So Hollywood, if you’ve ever housed a single conscientious thought within your vast, reptilian brain, please let this new version of The Grinch fade away. He’s suffered enough, all of Seuss’s wonderful characters have suffered enough, let the grim, clouded horizon I see before me be little more than a hellish nightmare. Let there never be a 2-hour musical CGI rendition of Green Eggs and Ham with Jay Bruchel and Will Ferrell. Let my twisted visions of Kanye West’s portrayal of Yertle the Turtle never slither into the daylight. May we never discover what it sounds like when Ester Dean and Usher decide to pen the music for One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish and spare us the haunting, harrowing reality of a hideous cinematic execution of Oh, The Places You’ll Go as realised by the idiots who made Hoodwinked.

Leave these stones unturned and we promise we’ll be more open minded about the next Adam Sandler movie, we’ll think twice before writing off Ghost Rider 3, we’ll do anything, just please leave Dr. Seuss alone. Leave our childhoods alone.