And Theodor Seuss Geisel, it should be noted, was hardly averse to commerce. He started out in advertising and built his middle name into a formidable brand that, like the Once-ler’s empire in “The Lorax,” grew bigger and bigger and bigger. But in his lifetime Geisel exercised strict quality control, a practice that his estate has abandoned, authorizing a series of cinematic abominations both live-action (“Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” “Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat”) and animated (“Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who!” and now this one).

“The Lorax,” while it nods in the direction of Dr. Seuss’s distinctive, trippy drawing style, treats his sensibility as, at best, a decorative element. The movie’s silliness, like its preachiness, is loud and slightly hysterical, as if young viewers could be entertained only by a ceaseless barrage of sensory stimulus and pop-culture attitude, or instructed by songs that make the collected works of Up With People sound like Metallica. The simple fable of the Lorax and the Once-ler is wrapped in gaudy, familiar business and festooned with grim, forced cheer. What do the kids want? Car chases! Kooky grandmas! Pint-size villains flanked by thuggish minions! Things that fly! Taylor Swift!

“The Lorax” has all that and more. (The grandma is voiced by the meme of the moment Betty White; a villain added for the movie is voiced by Rob Riggle.) It tells parallel stories, one about a young boy named Ted (Zac Efron), who in order to impress a girl (Ms. Swift) sets out to find an actual, living tree. (Of course the girl couldn’t possibly go out and find the tree herself, a sexist assumption that is, unfortunately, the only authentically Seussian aspect of the movie.) He ventures over the metal wall that encloses Thneedville and finds the Once-ler (Ed Helms), a hermit who tells the tale of his own encounter with the cranky orange Lorax (Danny DeVito).

“I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees.” Those words are a permanent part of the literary heritage, and no movie can change that. And when the Lorax is around, warily befriending the ambitious Once-ler, you can almost believe you are in the Seussian universe. The parable of an ambitious entrepreneur who lets his ingenuity curdle into unchecked greed is more or less intact, and his corruption is conveyed in a few memorable, semi-inspired visual flights. But these only emphasize the hectic, willful mediocrity that characterizes the rest of the movie, and far too many of its kind.

In the film as in the book, the Once-ler ravages the landscape and destroys the Truffula trees to manufacture thneeds, knitted garments that have multiple uses but no real utility. Demand for them is insatiable for a while, and then, once the trees are gone, the thneeds are forgotten, partly because nobody really needed them in the first place. There is an obvious metaphor here, but the movie is blind to it, and to everything else that is interesting or true in the story it tries to tell.