sketchydezzi

Believe it or not, the reason why I fangirl over the Once-ler isn’t lust

April 19, 2012 2 Comments

It’s pity and…well, empathy.

Don’t get me wrong, when he puts on that suit and gets that grin I’d let him nail me six ways to sunday, but all I feel for him in any form he’s in is overwhelming empathy.

Why?

Three lines:

Sketchy Dezzi’s Thoughts on The Lorax and the Villains Therein

April 12, 2012 1 Comment

How did I feel about this movie?

I really loved…half of it.

So, I loved half of the movie and thought the other half was below average, does that make it average?

I mean, getting passed the uselessness of some of the characters (*coughcoughmostofthepresenttimecastcough*) and how oddly their voices were cast, I really get behind this movie!

…but that doesn’t mean I don’t have my complaints.

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First things first, I’m judging this movie solely as a movie. I won’t be comparing it to its original short, or to the book, or even as an environmentalist flick. All I will say is, as a movie to inspire people to save the environment…I didn’t feel like planting a tree any of the three times I exited the theater. If you want to know how this movie felt to a real environmentalist, and in comparison to its counterparts, I would suggest watching The Nostalgia Chick’s Review. She makes valid points – this movie is more anti-corporation than anything (which wasn’t what Suess was about – he wanted to make sure we didn’t take the environment for granted).

Second things second, I’m going to cut my review of this movie into two separate parts. Why? Well, because there’s one half of this movie that works really well, and another half that’s really….flat. And this is supposed to be a quick review – not a novel.

A Little Backstory…

Based on a book of the same name by Dr. Suess, The Lorax was expanded to fill the screen by adding background for The Once-ler, who was the antagonist of the book, and giving Ted, the unnamed boy from the book, a plot line. The two plots play out simultaneously on-screen through The Once-ler, while he is an old man filled with regret.

Ted’s story is that he is a middle school kid who falls in love with a high school girl who is obsessed with trees. In a town made entirely of plastic, and having to ship in fresh air, real trees are unheard of, and no one has seen them in Thneedville for years.

Inspired to find her a real tree, Ted goes to see The Once-ler, the man who knows what happened to the trees. After being told of how the Once-ler destroyed every Truffula tree and drove away the forest animals, The Once-ler gives Ted the last trufulla seed. He goes to plant the seed, but is opposed by O’Hare, the head of O’Hare Air, the company that makes fresh air for people to breathe, and … well, it’s certainly no race against time, but must convince the people of Thneedville that trees are worth keeping around.

The Once-ler’s story is that he sets off at a young age (and is a human) to sell his invention: the thneed. He travels a long distance until he comes across a valley full of trufulla trees. He chops one down to make a thneed, but The Lorax comes up from the tree and tells The Once-ler to stop chopping down trees. Some hurtful words, threats, and attempted murders happen before The Once-ler promises not to chop down another tree. However, when sales on his Thneed go up, he needs more help to make them, and calls in his family, who convince him to go back on his promise and they begin to chop down trees.

One awesome song later, The Once-ler is confronted again by The Lorax who tries to reason with him one last time, but The Once-ler is so filled with greed and self-righteousness he doesn’t hear his friend’s words. When the last truffula tree falls, The Once-ler looses everything – his family, his friends, his wealth, and, most of all, realizes that he has driven the trees extinct and nothing can be done about it. The Lorax disappears into a hole in the smog, and The Once-ler is left staring at the word The Lorax left behind.

“Unless.”

Now…

I really liked The Once-ler’s story in this movie. In fact, The Once-ler was my favorite character because his story was so interesting. Was it perfect? No. Oh my Glob, no.

My first problem is his complete inability to see that chopping down the trees at all is ridiculous. I suppose it’s the point of the movie – doing the quickest thing to make a profit could lead to unexpected disasters, but you know what? It wasn’t the quickest thing, or the smartest thing, or even the easiest thing.

Chopping down trees, at least before they built those machines, would have taken muscle and hard work. Assuming one tree made a thneed (when he chopped down his first Truffula tree, he made one thneed with it and I saw no leftover material), that meant for every tree they chopped, they could then start making one thneed. One. Alternatively, they could have built a latter, climbed it, and started grabbing tufts by the handfuls, throwing them into color-coded piles. If you cut out the tree-cutting process, harvesting the tufts would bear a lot of material and knitting multiple thneeds could have happened simultaneously, and they’d have more truffula trees making more tufts instead of completely stopping the production of each tree.

The Once-ler seemed to recognize this at first, so he ordered his family to rip out tufts instead of chop them down. For some reason, his dumb as dirt family decided that building a ladder was much, much harder than just grabbing axes and swinging and THEN ripping out tufts. True, his two brothers seemed able to chop them down in one swing, but that was a testament to their strength – it took The Once-ler a few strikes earlier in the film to bring one down, and it can be assumed his mother, uncle, and aunt didn’t possess the same strength his brothers did. But, because he was being manipulated by his family, he couldn’t see reason. It was why he went off to make his fortune in the first place, so it makes sense manipulation would rear its ugly head again.

Also, I wished they had stretched out him going from a loveable, hopeful entreprenuer into a greedy businessman into more than one song. Or, instead, show a bit more of him when he became overcome with greed. A little contrast, to show what he was like before the last tree fell. Such as when faced with a failure and offered a helping hand, would he immediately smile and accept, like he did with The Lorax, or would he become angrier, and retreat to count his money?

Or, how does he interact with his family now? Do they still look down on him or manipulate him? Or has money and success turned the tables? How did he deal with power over his family? The change happens so quickly, and even though time is obviously passing during the interlude, it doesn’t really hit how slippery a slope he’s fallen and how long it took to get him there until the last tree falls.

I love it when characters like this are sympathetic, but that doesn’t absolve him of anything. In fact, I would have loved it if The Once-ler was kept as the main villain, and not this “Once-ler 2.0″ O’Hare guy.

Who the Hell is O’Hare, anyway?

I know I said I wouldn’t be comparing it to the book, but O’Hare was not in the original short OR book. To make The Once-ler a sympathetic character, they took all of his greed and ambition and none of his endearing traits and funnelled it into a character named Aloicious O’Hare – a short fellow who, after the thneed factory smogged up the air, found a way to purify it and sell it to people. His adversary becomes Ted, who is basically all of The Once-ler’s good traits funnelled into a middle school kid (which is why I think the two look so similar), but with the exception that he’s young, and therefore relatable to young audiences. That, and he likes a girl, which gets the plot ball rolling (which is a topic I’ll discuss in a later essay).

O’Hare serves the purpose of getting rid of the “evil” part of The Once-ler and giving him redemption, but without actually showing the “death” (well, banishment and rejection is more appropriate) of The Once-ler’s greed in his character. Why? Because then we couldn’t have a final showdown with a chase scene and stuff, a-duh.

Aside from the fact that O’Hare is irredeemable and boring as a villain (and has no idea what Public Relations means), his purpose is moot. We already have the potential for a great villain in The Once-ler. Green-suited-Greedy!Once-ler already had his downfall. We didn’t need a climactic chase scene and a rousing speech from Ted to know to save trees. Hearing The Once-ler’s story showed us more than Ted could have ever told us!

Young audiences would have understood a villain that wasn’t finger-steeple-in-a-giant-mansion-sitting-on-a-throne-of-money could still be evil or bad. Young audiences would have understood that this old man full of regret, living in the middle of nowhere, was someone to be both pitied and against. They would have understood that, just by the way he accepts the blame for what he had done and gaves Ted the seed, that this person used to be good and went off of that path for a while. They would have thought “I could end up like The Once-ler, too!” and they would have taken away from the movie not to let things like greed turn you away from your friends and what is important in life.

Instead we got a 2-dimensional villain with no redeeming qualities who is defeated at the end of the day. We clap out hands, say “Well, the bad guys are beaten!” and go home and maybe plant a tree maybe if there’s time maybe we’ll do it next week maybe maybe maybe.

Sometimes, it isn’t so black-and-white as all that. Sometimes you have villains like The Once-ler, who aren’t all bad, and who used to be one of the good guys. Sometimes the villain is your own potential to take things like the environment for granted because of your ignorance.

You have to care. You can’t let ignorance cloud your judgement. That’s what The Once-ler’s villainy should have taught us.

So, what did O’Hare’s irredeemable and boring stint as a villain teach us?

Not to sing “Let it die” in front of a crowd that wants the exact opposite of what you want, to lay low and pretend you care about trees, and to destroy the tree while every one is asleep so they have no choice but to depends on your product for the rest of their lives.

I am Sketchy Dezzi, and no I was never going to rhyme anywhere in this essay.

Originally posted here

Filed under TV & Movies Tagged with The Lorax, The Once-ler, The Oncler