You’re insane. That is now clear to me. Yes, it is apparent that they needed to add some fluff to make a children’s book into a full-length movie. But I say the fluff could be good. The entire Lorax book was nothing but unsolved riddles. It was like the 5th season of LOST: all questions and no answers.

The Lorax is the perfect example of a story that wasn’t told. Yeah we got the gist of it: Stop cutting down trees, Assholes! But what about everything else? Who was the Lorax? Did he live inside the tree stump? Where did he go after all the trees were cut down? What is this futuristic treeless existence like? ANYTHING? Nothing was explained in the book. Granted, that was the style of the time: Don’t ask questions, what you see is what you get, isn’t that enough for you?

And I say “NO!” I ask the tough questions that childhood classics like to gloss over. Is the Grinch a Who? Are the Whos in the Grinch book the same Whos from Horton’s book? What kind of tyrannical Dictatorship does Candy Land live under? If Battleship has two armies of the exact same ships, then what country has been split apart by civil war? What’s the deal with Legend of Zelda; is it all one long story or different tellings of the same story? And are the armies in the Butter Battle Book and Gulliver’s Travels supposed to be the same because they’re fighting the war for the exact same reasons?

Movies like the Lorax need to be made. There is no such thing as an original idea. What we do have is an abundance of unoriginal source materials and original takes on them. Nothing made before today is so perfect that it can’t be re-made, or added on to, or expanded upon, or looked at from a slightly different angle. Never accept the things in life at face-value. The Lord of the Flies is not about dumb kids on an island. Look deeper. Always look deeper.