The Lorax

I haven't been this disappointed in a movie since...The Clash of the Titans came out (and ironically, I just saw a preview for a sequel....Who knows, maybe this is where they actually introduce the Titans?).
I'm a huge animated movie fan. I got Despicable ME and Monsters Inc. for Christmas and was excited about it.  Horton Hears a Who is my go to movie when I am sick in bed, or feeling blue, and so I was pretty stoked to go see The Lorax over the weekend and...what a disappointment! We were about 20 minutes into the movie when I actually whispered to my BF "Wow. This is really boring. This is not funny at all." And it was true. The one minute preview of Despicable Me 2 was funnier than the whole feature we went to see.
The Lorax is a thinly veiled "save the trees/ socialist/weirdly religious/sexist" affair, with  horrible music, disturbing LSD-like montages, and no humor what so ever. I almost got up and left half way through, it was that bad.
The movie is about a young inventor with a bright idea and a twinkle in his eye who goes out and tries to make these things called thneads. He uses the leaves from trees (which don't look anything like trees) to make them, and as his company becomes more successful, the more trees he chops. He bribes the creepy woodland creatures (who remind me of something off a Greatful Dead bumper sticker) with marshmallows until he can't anymore, and then he just ignores them and buys himself a ridiculous Flava-Flav suit and dances around singing about how he's done "nothing wrong", with dollar signs dancing behind him.

Eventually of course the trees are gone, air quality starts going down, the Lorax ascends into heaven, and the would-be inventor locks himself away in guilty exile, but does nothing to fix the problem. Years pass, and then some other cliched-corporate A-hole starts selling manufactured "fresh air" (which reminds me of Spaceballs) to the wholly oblivious town of Thneadville.
In Thneadville there is a little boy who had the hots for the slightly older neighbor girl. She wishes she could see a real tree, so he goes out to find one for her. Why she can't go out and find her own tree is beyond me. But apparently she is either not creative enough to think if it on her own, or smart enough to...who knows.
So then the boy goes to see the inventor who tells him the whole story of how he's responsible for all the trees being gone and gives the boy a seed to plant a tree (why he didn't plant it himself is one of the many obvious questions that the writers didn't bother to ask) and then suddenly there are trees everywhere (never mind that there was only ONE seed left) and everyone is happy, and the little boy is a hero and gets a kiss from the girl, and the Lorax descends from the sky like Jesus on the day of glory, and the Inventor is redeemed. The end.
The credits started rolling and I was like...WTF?!
It is my opinion that this movie is a total waste of money. I wouldn't even recommend it on Netflix because you still won't be able to get that hour and a half of your life back. In fact, if someone were to walk up to me and offer me a free copy of this movie I would say "No thanks." and move on. You can, of course, go see it if you want to. Just don't say I didn't warn you.