Imagine you’re a little girl. I know this is next to impossible — or so we’re meant to believe — for half the human race, but give it a try. Maybe you’re already interested in environmental issues, or maybe you just like adventure stories. You see this trailer — or, assuming that this accurately represents the product, the film — and you discover (yet again!) that girls do not have adventures. Not even when they really really want to do something amazing, such as see a real live tree. Girls just lie around daydreaming about doing things. But if a girl is lucky — and very pretty
— a boy will come along who wants to impress you
and he will go on a quest on your behalf. When he comes back from his incredible adventure, on which he sees things unimaginable and experiences life in a way that you never will, maybe you’ll get to kiss him.
Because you are a girl, even though you might care “a whole awful lot,” you cannot help make things “get better.” It’s simply not in you to be an effective agent of change.
If you’re a girl who is unlucky enough to be not very pretty or not very demure or in some other way not at all what a girl is “supposed” to be
then strange (male) monsters will insult you and even doubt that you’re a girl at all. Even if the strange (male) monster is a sort of nature spirit who might be presumed to be able to tell the difference between male and female creatures.
If The Lorax were truly from the makers of Despicable Me — which featured not one, not two, but three amazing and different-from-one-another little girls — it would be a lot more girl-positive than it appears to be.
