Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax Blu-ray/DVD Combo Pack Review
Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax Blu-ray/DVD Combo Pack Review
SoHood.com Reviewed by: Johnny Pavlik
Movie Rating: 4 out of 5
Extras Rating: 5 out of 5
Overview: A 12-year-old boy searches for the one thing that will enable him to win the affection of the girl of his dreams. To find it he must discover the story of the Lorax, the grumpy yet charming creature who fights to protect his world.
Review: The film starts off with a female named Audrey voiced by Taylor Swift who shows off her mural painting of trees to Ted voiced by Zac Efron. Audrey loves trees. She has dreamed of seeing trees in person but she hasn’t due to a greedy act once done by Once-ler voiced by Ed Helms years ago.
Ted likes Audrey a whole lot. He’s determined to find a plant seed to make Audrey’s wish come true of seeing a real life tree. However, in Ted’s way is a sinister funny looking little man named Mr. O’Hare voiced by Rob Riggle, who only wants to keep profiting from selling bottled air. (laughing)
Anyways, Ted goes off into the other side of town, which seem polluted and downright filthy to live in. Ted encounters The Once-ler voiced by Ed Helms. Ted tells Once-ler about wanting to find a plant seed to grow a tree. Viewers are then thrust into a flashback sequence of Once-ler’s youthful life where he tells Ted how the Truffula trees disappeared. He tells Ted that the leaves were used to manufacture and sell “Thneeds”, (it’s a soft sweater). The guard keeper of the Truffula trees, The Lorax voiced by Danny DeVito, (which he was the perfect voice choice for the Lorax), failed to stop Once-ler.
Long story short, the only thing that bothered me about this animated film were the transition of scenes where Once-ler is telling the story of how he did wrong, then we’re thrust into the present where Ted is then caught by Mr. O’Hare and his overly huge bodyguards. Then it goes back to the flashback of Once-ler resuming his story of how the trees were all cut down.
It took a while for the story to develop and there were a lot of scenes that should have just been cut out from the film. I thought in the begin that it was going to be a love story between Aubrey and Ted, but it did not turn out that way.
Now I’m all for anti-pollution and one of my favorite songs comes from Michael Jackson in which he remarkably sang on “Earth Song”. But the film felt like a “Keep Earth Clean” infomercial. The main plot of the antagonist Mr. O’Hare was to pollute and be greedy, and nothing else.
However, I was entertained even though I was bored at times, I wanted to actually know what was going to happen at the end. One of my favorite scenes that had me bust out in laughter was towards the end of the film where everybody joins in a sing along tune, then out the blue, a fat man in a yellow sweatsuit, jumps into the air and sings his heart out by hitting them high notes with excitement.
The Good: Loved the film visually. The characters are interesting and fun to look at. Overall a great positive message.
The Bad: The flow of the film just wasn’t on point but since this is only targeted to kids, I don’t think they will mind the story structure. The visuals on screen is just amazing, so it won’t matter to kids.
The specific aspects of the Audio and visuals for the Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax Blu-ray Disc:
The picture quality on this is Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC. Video resolution: 1080p, Aspect ratio: 2.35:1, Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1 and the Audio on this Blu-ray is DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1.
Commentary: In my opinion, the visuals were just excellent. The audio was perfect and I didn’t encounter any issues.
Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax Bonus Features On Blu-ray & DVD:
- Making of Mini-Movies: Go behind the scenes at Illumination Mac Guff to see the joys and challenges of continuing the characters’ stories in the dynamic format of the mini movie.
- Mini-Movies:
- Serenade — Two Bar-ba-loots — one love shy and the other suave and confident — battle for the heart of their would-be sweetheart with the help of a colorful cast of characters, including the Humming-Fish and Swomme-Swans.
- Wagon-Ho—Two Bar-ba-loots take The Once-ler’s wagon on a ride they won’t soon forget.
- Forces of Nature—Determined to scare The Once-ler out of Truffula Valley, The Lorax decides to create the illusion of ominous forces of nature.
- Seuss to Screen: A fascinating look into the translation of Seuss’ iconic style from book into the big feature film canvas. SEUSS IT UP!— A great tutorial on how to draw the Lorax, a Humming-Fish and a Bar-ba-loot in the unique Seuss style.
- O-Hare TV: Watch the Lorax with hilarious commercial interruptions courtesy of O’Hare TV.
- Expedition to Tuffula Valley: Explore and navigate within the Truffula Valley to learn more about how the characters and creatures come to life.
Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax - Trailer – Own it on Blu-ray & DVD
About the Film
- Stars: Danny DeVito, Ed Helms, Zac Efron, Betty White, Taylor Swift
- Language: English
- Number of discs:2
- Studio: Universal Studios
- Blu-ray Release Date: August 7, 2012
- Run Time:87 minutes
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