The face of Dr. Seuss’ Once-ler revealed!
For 40 years, fans of Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax have wondered about The Once-ler.
Exactly who – or what – is attached to those spindly green arms, seen in the 1971 storybook heedlessly chopping down the lush, candy-colored truffula forest? Until now, only the grouchy Lorax (who confronts him declaring, “I speak for the trees!”) could know for sure.
Though the good doctor never showed us The Once-ler’s face, a new Universal movie (out March 2) from the animation team whose credits include Despicable Me and Horton Hears a Who offers a surprising twist to a longtime pop-culture mystery.
Dr. Seuss fans, prepare to lay your eyes on The Once-ler.
Below is how we see him in the Illumination Entertainment movie, and the surprise is that the Once-ler is not some Grinch-esque monster after all.
Instead, he’s a misguided, fresh-faced young man (voiced by The Office’s Ed Helms), whose destructive actions warp not only his world, but eventually himself. Meanwhile, the smallish, brownish, bossy Lorax (voiced by Danny DeVito) pleads and scolds on behalf of Seuss’ curlicue fantasy woodlands, but this story is ultimately about two things: making bad choices, and making amends.(Read more at EW’s site, including other stills from the movie)
At first I didn’t like this idea. I mean, in the books, the Once-ler is a great mystery that Seuss never explains and leaves you wondering about.
But after reading this quote from the Producer, Christopher Meledandri, I sort of agree with him:
“The minute you make the Once-ler a monster, you allow the audience to interpret that the problem is caused by somebody who is different from me, and it ceases to be a story that is about all of us,” says Meledandri. “Then it’s a story about, ‘Oh I see, the person who led us into the predicament is not a person. It’s somebody very, very different.’ And so it takes you off the hook.”
Meledandri said the author wanted readers to feel that they could change things — both for better and for worse — based on their behavior. We could be The Lorax, we could be the boy, or …
“What I think Ted is saying is: there is a Once-ler in all of us,” Meledandri says.
The moral behind The Lorax doesn’t just end at “Do your part to take care of the environment or you’ll regret it, because who else will if not you?” but extends to making amends for past actions. I agree that there’s a little Once-ler in all of us, and depicting the Once-ler as a regular human being who is subject to the same temptations and foibles as the rest of us might be one of the best ways to illuminate that idea.
its so surreal to see things like this now but i agree so much, he needed to be a human that we could relate to and they did it beautifully
I’m glad someone finally put this into words~
