THE LAST TREE

A band of wanderers heedlessly turn a sylvan paradise into a drab, soul-destroying settlement.

Hammering on its message with more force than logic, this cheerless variation on The Lorax (1971) and many like parables since squanders a promising beginning and a racially diverse cast that also includes both heterosexual and same-sex couples on simplistic symbolism and a trite outcome. After spending an idyllic summer singing and dancing together under the trees, the new arrivals cut a few branches for firewood. When the resulting gaps in the canopy let in the rain, they cut some more wood for shelters, then yet more for full houses, and finally a towering wall for a windbreak that uses all the remaining trees except for one spindly sapling. By that time they’re all mutually suspicious, spiteful types who send their children out to cut down the last tree so no one else will get it. The children refuse, tearing down part of the wall instead…and when the grown-ups rush out to see where the wind’s coming from, “all at once they understood what they had done.” (Uh-huh.) A day, or at least a page turn, later, tall new trees have suddenly sprouted among the houses, and the erstwhile despoilers are happily turning the wall into, apparently, piles of lumber.

Nothing fresh here, nor even—aside from the colored-pencil backgrounds—green.