The Once-ler Character Review

The Once-ler from The Lorax movie, especially the young man of a Once-ler which you see in the past scenarios, is really cute and adorable. He wants to earn money, so he departs from his family farm to find materials for his so-called Thneed invention that could do a million uses. After he finds a valley rich of trees, bears, birds, and fish, he can't help but exploit the trees for their tufts, to make his Thneed, despite helpless ranting from the Lorax who speaks for the trees. But after five or so years, all the trees have disappeared and the animals go away, too. So then, up to the end of his days, the Once-ler feels shame in what he has done to the environment and lives as an introverted recluse in his "Lerkim" on top of his abandoned store. Read on to learn more about this breakout character when the movie first came out in 2012, and even made a fandom of its own.

SHELTER AND TALENT

The Once-ler lives with his family in a white house on a farm, before departing. When he moves to the valley, he sets up a yellow tent that supposedly looks like a tiny cottage. The tent has a green roof, with an outhouse to the right. It has been implied that the Once-ler also likes to eat marshmallows, because you can see him packing in two large bags of marshmallow into his wagon cart. He also knows how to knit, and also to cook and flip pancakes way up high while singing, “Pancake, the pancake,” then manages to pull off many dozens of those pancakes to share to the animals and the Lorax.

PERSONALITY

He is somewhat clumsy, dorky, sympathetic, an average 20-year-old farmer boy. And that voice? It's so cute and dorky. I have quite made impressions of Ed Helms's voice. I even tried to belt out the Once-ler's songs in this voice.

PHYSICAL APPEARANCE

He has a thin body, babyface, a round button nose, long eyelashes (like Nermal, the annoying kitten from Garfield), some light freckles and black swept-up hair. His attractive, swept to the left hairstyle is perfectly topped with a fedora. But, if you want to draw the Once-ler as faithful as the movie, it's really going to be inconsistent because you can't decide which size and position his nose should be. To get matters straight, his innocent blue eyes make him cute and handsome.

ATTIRE

His three outfits that you see all in the movie are creative; the work outfit, the sleepwear, and his entrepreneur outfit.

Work outfit

When you first see the Once-ler in his past, you see him clad in a fedora, gray vest over a white shirt, striped gray pants and shoes. The white shirt has long sleeves which are rolled up to the middle of his forearm. He also wears green work gloves which the inner and bottom are colored beige. Enough said. But, how do they have striped gray denim pants in the 1970-somethings, you want to know? We know that vest and long-sleeved shirt combos have existed in the retro past and beyond. But look at his pair shoes. They are pretty much plain and dusty. They could have been hand-me-downs from his not-seen father. Why the same work outfit every time he gets out of his cottage? Is it because his family cannot afford clothes so they give him a limited wardrobe? You think about that. Next, when you see the Once-ler unloading his wagon, it is implied that he wears heart-print boxer shorts underneath his pants. Talk about throwing underwear to an unfortunate bear's head!

Sleepwear

When the Once-ler goes to bed, he wears blue pajamas with yellow bunny patterns on them. We have seen that color design before; in the film Despicable Me, on Agnes's pajamas! Although, Agnes's has teddy bear heads instead of rabbits. Talk about an unoriginal sleepwear design! Maybe the creators were lazy and decided to throw in Agnes's sleepwear pattern to the Once-ler. Now, let me get this thing straight. Does this mean that Agnes is distantly related to the Once-ler? Did the Once-ler buy his pajamas from the same clothing shop as Agnes's? By the way, the Once-ler's pajamas has five white button with a collar that is also white so that you can take them off easily. The only complaint about Once-ler's pajamas is that the pattern is copied from Agnes's. Everything else about it is fine.

Entrepreneur outfit

The Once-ler's green business outfit is introduced right in the beginning of the musical number, "How Bad Can I Be." It's so shockingly flashy. What's impressing is that he wears green gloves that go up to his shoulders. Creative for a character adapted from a 1971 rhymed picture book. The green striped coat over the white shirt with the large collar, has long coattails, along with a red Truffula tuft stuck on to his right lapel. There are two gold buttons that hold the coat together, and a gold chain under it. The black necktie with the green stripes means business. The coat is paired with a pair of black pants and shoes, along with a tall black top hat that has a green trim along it. The Once-ler continues to wear this flashy outfit after the last Truffula tree has been felled.

Guitar

He also carries along a gray electric guitar with him, which is smashed by some little girl after a failed attempt to advertise the Thneed. Later, the guitar is repaired with duct tape that disappears at the very beginning of the Once-ler’s villainous musical number which I mentioned before on the last paragraph that I wrote and composed (It was an animation blunder, mind you). That guitar was soon replaced by a better and cooler red electric guitar, which with a strum of it, can literally topple down a hundred trees.

MULE AND FAMILY

His gray mule, Melvin, pulls his wagon vehicle across many places, but also moves it slowly, taking days, until Melvin alerts the Once-ler to show him something that he would like. Melvin also likes to eat Truffula Fruit, as shown when the Lorax feeds him that fruit. When the Once-ler’s company falls apart and the environment is polluted and dirtied, Melvin goes along with the animals on their way out in order to find a better and safer habitat to live in.

His mother, Isabella Once-ler (That is what the Lorax fans call her), is blonde and has a red hairclip on top of her poufy curled up hair. She wears a lavender polka-dot long-sleeved shirt and a boa which looks like a red dog. I think the dog has been slaughtered to make the boa. Isabella also wears glasses which frames are colored blue, and are oval. A long skirt and gray boots complete the look. Now then, the Once-ler’s uncle, Ubb is as short as Aloysius O’Hare and wears all black even donning a bowler hat, while his aunt, Grizelda is very fat, has ginger hair shaped like two crescents, and wears a purple dress with a beret decorated with a white feather. The Once-ler’s twin brothers, Brett and Chet Once-ler, both wear red shirts and blue overalls that have one strap loose. They are also mischievous and tease the Once-ler himself. They think that a bear is a football and throw it way far. They are bald, just like their uncle. The Once-ler family, overall, like to be quick and lazy and does not like his way of just harvesting the Truffula tufts, because it is very inconvenient and also very slow.