Headscratchers / The Lorax (2012)

Where Did the Other Seeds Come From?

• Where did all of those Truffula Trees from the end of the Movie version come from? Were the seeds lying dormant? Seeds brought in by the returning animals? Where?
  • The seeds most likely came from the tree that was planted with the last seed.
  • But during the end of the movie we watched the tree grow, and what looked like about a month pass by. It was still a tiny sapling by the end of the movie, it wouldn't be big enough to have more seeds.
    • Some trees can start producing seeds when they've still got decades of growth ahead of them. It wouldn't be implausible for truffulas to generate their first seeds within a year or two.
    • It's also possible that truffula trees can propagate using underground runners like strawberry and mint plants do.
  • Also, we should keep in mind that this is the Dr. Seuss universe; Truffula trees might grow differently than our trees.
  • It's quite probable the Once-ler lied, given the biological issues with repopulating a species with a single specimen. If so, then he actually has a large number of seeds, but if he just planted them then people wouldn't value them at all, and would just let O'Hare cut them down again.
    • Yeah, it was already sprouting tufts by the time they planted it, and all that it'd gotten was a bit of water less than an hour before.
    • But then it begs another question: if Truffula trees could grow so quickly, why didn't Oncler plant more as he was cutting them down? That way, the animals would've been able to stay and he would've been able to keep making Thneeds.
    • He's a Corrupt Corporate Executive (at least for one song). He could have found a better way to harvest the tufts without chopping the trees down too, but he didn't due to greed. By the time he realized what he'd done, the entire forest was gone, and it was a huge forest, so it'd take a while to replenish.
    • But if the trees grow that quickly, wouldn't it have regrown before he could chop them all down?
    • The film is kind of ambiguous about the amount of time that passes. The first Truffula in the town is shown growing, and that's used as a transition to a different Truffula out near the Once-ler's home. Either way, the film's Truffula grow a lot faster than the original Truffula (which took around twenty years to completely mature).

Why the Middle of Town?

• Why do they have to plant the seed in the middle of town (besides for dramatic tension)? The ground under the plastic wouldn't be any better than what was outside and they could have nurtured the plant without O'Hare potentially interfering, which would have sped up the forest's rejuvenation and given them a more compelling argument for the trees.
  • Maybe because the air outside of Thneedville was still horribly polluted. Second, they mentioned that they wanted the tree to grow where everyone could see it, presumably so people could appreciate it. Even if they were able to plant the tree outside, O'Hare could've not only destroyed it, but he could do it without other people knowing. If people don't know that the tree exists and can create oxygen, he could've gotten rid of it without anyone knowing or caring.
  • Multiple studies in New York's Central Park show that the interior of a city is much better for growing trees than the countryside both due to the elevated CO2 levels and the urban heat-island effect. This is excluding the fact that wild trees have a ludicrously low survival rate (as low as 5%) Really, it's best to grow the last of an endangered species in a protected, park environment.
  • I thought it was to prevent O'Hare from interfering. He may not have many cameras outside the city, but it's not hard to spot a lone tree. If he plants it in the middle of the city, everyone will see it, and O'Hare won't be able to cut it down unless everyone lets him.

Why Live in Thneedville?

• Why would anyone live in Thneedville? There's obviously other, less polluted locations in the world (see Artistic License-Geography on the main page), so why would the ancestors of the current generation choose to live in the middle of a desolate wasteland?
  • And for that matter, how did the Once-ler survive for so long outside of the city? He has to have been there a while, since he was still clean-shaven when the Lorax left and he has a big beard by the present. Nobody ever leaves Thneedville and it appears the Once-ler never leaves his house. Also, there's almost nothing out there for him to eat or drink and the air is even worse than the air inside of the city.
    • Since the Once-ler was designing Thneedville just before the last tree fell, it's likely that it was supposed to be a home for his factory's workers (like how Hershey, PA started). Then the factory went bust, and this area is so remote that going anywhere was impractical, so O'Hare convinced them to finish Thneedville because he would bring new jobs at the air factory.
    • This is... this is a fabulous explanation. Thank you!
    • One can further guess that, given that the thneed was a boom-and-bust product, the town's name is a relic of its original purpose.
  • The citizens don't know that the area is polluted, save the old people. Remember that everyone gasped in shock when the wall fell down.

How Does O'Hare Get Away with It?

• So, regarding the O'Hare guy... He has cameras all over the city, but couldn't he have gotten in trouble for that? He's a powerful man, but unless he's some sort of government dictator, how would he be able to enforce rules like preventing people from leaving town? Is it ever explained?
  • He was the Mayor as well as the richest man. And people can't complain if they don't know, and Ted was the first one to ever leave town in a long, long time.
    • But even that begs the question as to WHY nobody has left Thneedville and WHY no one ever tried to figure out why the place was a complete wasteland.
    • Why would they?
    • Why was the big button, which gave access to the outside world and was labeled 'Authorized Personnel Only', unlocked???
    • Because it didn't need to be locked: everyone was happy to stay within the walls anyways, and probably didn't even glance a second time at the boring tall grey steel when they had all the bright colourful plastic lights in the city.
  • Some people just like to live in a totally artificial environment with no plants. They just like to not give their house a touch of nature greens... humans are weird, and some even more than others.

Being Blamed for Selling Air isn't Fair

• What's so bad about O'Hare selling air? For all we know, there is no natural source of clean air in Thneedville - The only Truffula seed we know exists is in the hands of the Once-ler, who keeps it hidden and doesn't plant it, so artificial air should logically be the only way to go. It's suggested to the audience that O'Hare is selling his air at an unfair price and in an environmentally unsound way, but there is no evidence for this in the film. We see pollution in and around Thneedville, but how do we know that isn't leftover runoff from the time the Once-ler cut down all the trees? In fact, how do we know that O'Hare has anything to do with the pollution in Thneedville? Clueless Aesop much?
  • The premise seems to be that he wants the land to remain in the state the Once-ler left it, and he may be keeping it that way so the air is still profitable.
  • There is a scene in the movie where the two guys are pitching the "air-bottle" idea to him and they start making headway with O'Hare after pointing out that they would have to build a new factory to make the bottles, and a new factory would mean more pollution, which generates more need for O'Hare's air. So it definitely comes across like O'Hare is not only profiting, but is encouraging further pollution to make money.

Learning is a Threat

• Obviously people in Thneedville know about real, living trees. Audrey knew a lot about them, Ted's mom seems to know they once existed, and Ted's grandmother is even old enough to remember them being around. So why does O'Hare take it as a threat just because one more kid learns about them? Ted expresses interest in trees, but until he gets the seed, O'Hare has no way of knowing that Ted intends to get a real, living tree and be a threat to his business.
  • Ted was treated as a threat because he was the first one to actually leave the city in search for the seeds, and refused to back down after the thinly-veiled threats.
    • But O'Hare didn't know that Ted was actively looking for a tree to bring back, just that he was trying to find out where they were. And for all O'Hare knew, there weren't any seeds left anyway.
    • He was paranoid. What if he didn't know everything and there were seeds left? And no normal person spares real trees a second thought: Ted was being extremely suspicious and probably harboured huge devious plans to overthrow O'Hare's business.
    • And it's left unclear, but O'Hare had to have known whom Ted was seeing. The Once-ler was the town founder and a powerful businessman back in the day. And he's still lurking out there, obviously not happy about the situation and having a vested interest in bringing trees back. Ted may not have been the one O'Hare was afraid of.

No Seriously, Who Does Care if a Few Trees are Dying?!

• The hypocrisy - the forest animals treat the Once-ler cutting down one tree as if he's killed the most important person in the world, but trees die of natural causes or even old age all the time - that's why there are seeds, so there can be new generations to replace the old. Also, the fish at least are confirmed to eat other animals (fireflies), but nobody mourns the eaten fireflies.
  • There's a huge difference between a tree dying of natural causes and a tree being cut down. Once-ler cutting down that tree served no purpose other then to make harvesting the tufts a little easier. That's it. No other reason to cut down the tree. As for the fish, they need to eat the fireflies, and that's why they eat them. It isn't laziness.
  • Also, it's pretty darn clear that no one from the nearby village comes into the Truffula forest, especially not that far in, as the animals had no idea what he was. They've never seen a tree being cut down, and ran in surprised fright from the noise. It wasn't until the Lorax came that they actually seem to mourn for the trees, and even then, it could be just because the Lorax himself was mourning for the trees.
  • Though I have to say... There's not much hypocrisy from the other characters in the story, but from the audience I've noticed... People really agree with the Once-ler's condemnation, when we are most likely no better, and there are worse things happening in the world, bigger deforestation that people all over the world benefit from and don't think twice about. In their world, this was a really big deal and he deserved his fate, but compared to OUR world, his mistakes were merely poor business decisions.
  • Also, that's like saying "We shouldn't make a big deal if a guy gets murdered, since he was just going to die sooner or later." They probably do mourn for a little bit when an old withered tree dies, but wouldn't make as big a deal as they would if a tree were cut down for no justifiable reason while in its prime.
  • The rate at which trees are cut down is what matters. Trees normally die at a rate that is roughly even with the rate at which they grow. If you cut them down faster than that then you get deforestation, which causes broader ecological impacts because large parts of the ecosystem rely on those trees - e.g., animals that need trees to live will die off, and the topsoil can be damaged because trees played a vital role in keeping it in place. And this is, in fact, what happened - the Once-ler was killing a lot more than a "few" trees, much faster than they could grow, leading to ecological devastation. There actually are safe and sustainable ways to cut down trees, especially if you replant them, but the Once-ler wasn't logging sustainably (and not all trees can be sustainably regrown at a rate that meets demand; e.g. mahogany takes too long to grow for us to ever use it for large-scale construction in the long term, so once old growth is used up, that's it.)

The Mysteries of the Moral

• The entire moral is confusing to me:
  • The Lorax leaves the Once-ler, his family leaves him and he ends up so depressed he never leaves his house anymore. If the goal of the movie was to promote environmentalism, the Once-ler should have solved his own problem, but no: he waits for someone with no emotional trauma to come along and fix what he broke. So... we're supposed to be depressed about our misdeeds and hope that the next generation can do something better about it? What kind of a moral is that?
    • The moral isn't reduced, it's a carryover from the original book. "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not." Unless the next generation cares, then they'll just make the same mistakes the previous generation made. It's also possible that the Once-ler thought a single Truffula tree wouldn't survive all alone out in a polluted land. Thneedville is also polluted, but it's still inhabitable.
    • After having broken his promise and screwed up the environment so badly, the Once-ler may simply not have trusted himself to be the one to bring the trees back. He was counting on Ted because Ted had gone to such great lengths to come talk to him about trees, and kept coming back even when it became dangerous to do so, so had the determination to stick by his commitments.
  • Not to mention the character plots... Ted, who had a very nice life for himself, a kind mother and grandmother, a girl who obviously already liked him, etc. gets to be the hero. Why? What lesson does he learn? The Once-ler on the other hand is a very sad character who only gets sadder. It would have made sense to have him fix everything, since he was the one who needed the happy ending to finish his character arc. He goes from sad to sadder, and then he gets "redeemed" by someone who wasn't even there for him? What's up with that? During the entire movie he's thrown around like a ragdoll, then they just shuffle his character away so that Ted has a chance to shine.
    • The Once-ler's redemption doesn't come from Ted's actions or from the Lorax's forgiveness, it comes from him realizing he's made a horrible mistake in destroying the first forest, and from taking care of the second forest. The Lorax returning and renewing their friendship was his happy ending. Ted was the audience surrogate; he learned the lesson every one else learned, which was that the world you live in isn't perfect, and that you need to acknowledge and work to change that. It seems that you've never read the original book or seen the animated adaptation; in them, no one fixes anything, and it ends with the Once-ler simply giving an anonymous kid a seed and telling him the Unless message. They had to have Ted actively work to change things, because otherwise they would be deviating too heavily from the source material.
    • No, I've seen both the 1971 short and read the book. Don't patronize me, come on, now. Those two work because the Once-ler acts only on greed. He's not sympathetic, and he represents corporations, not humanity/new generations like Ted does. The Once-ler in the book/short feels shame about his decisions, but the story's not about his shame. It doesn't matter if he cares or not. What matters is that Ted cares. In the new movie, however, the story is half about the Once-ler. They spend a lot of time illustrating what kind of character he is and the intent behind his actions, but he doesn't finish his character arc. He's set up as sympathetic, then doesn't get a very happy ending. In the book/short, the Once-ler doesn't need a happy ending, it's not important. I'm analyzing the characters personally, not the plot as a whole. For the plot, yeah, it all works out, but when you take a step inward and look at the characters themselves as people, the story doesn't really hold them up very well. If the movie wanted to focus on the plot and the symbolism, that's what it should have done, not make the Once-ler have a Freudian excuse for what he does, because that's irrelevant. Hope this makes sense.
    • I find this Tumblr post summarizes everything quite neatly: http://quietlyinvisible.tumblr.com/post/19423322619/my-own-view
    • Ted is us. He is the common person. Most people don't have horrible home lives, we actually have pretty good ones. Our troubles pale in comparison to Once-ler's if we really think about it. That is why Ted is the one to plant the seed— because it's us that needs to plant those seeds.
      Yes, Once-ler wants his happy ending; but let's face it. He screwed up big time. Not all of those problems are his families. His family helped with a lot of them— but when he first came to the Truffula forest, he was the one to chop down that tree for no reason other then to harvest the tufts. In other words: Pure laziness. That was what summoned the Lorax in the first place, really: someone harming the forest when they didn't have to.
      It's also why the Lorax said he wasn't Once-ler's friend. The Lorax is far too honest for that sort of stuff— he's the forest guardian, and he wasn't there to be Once-ler's friend, he was there to protect the forest. And who's to say that the Lorax did recognize that the Once-ler needed support and family? He's the only Lorax, and it's obvious that he normally hangs out with forest animals. He might not even really know what a family is.
      But the point is, Once-ler screwed up and made a bunch of bad decisions. He affected a lot of people, not just himself. An entire eco-system was destroyed and all of the animals within displaced. The Lorax himself stated that he couldn't make everything magically better. So he leaves. Once-ler's family leaves because they didn't love him in the first place. The animals leave because there's no more food.
      Really, he's actually a Villain. A woobie villain, but still a villain. We realize he probably didn't mean to, but he still did it. He still cut down the trees, still polluted the air. He made his decisions, and he reaped the consequences of them.
      Ted on the other hand didn't have to do anything at all. He could've decided that trees weren't important, that he could find some other, easier way to impress Audrey. Because by the second day when you're being threatened with bodily harm, one usually backs off. He doesn't. There are a million reasons why he should've backed away from the trees- he could have been lazy and decided the effort wasn't worth it. He could've been like the Once-ler and O'Hare and be greedy. He could've tried to sell that last seed, he could've kept it for himself.
      There are a million things he could've done, but ultimately he chose the right one— planting the seed.
      He didn't have to. Just like we don't have to help out with the environment, or any cause at all. We're all safe. Why should we be the ones? Why can't the person who created the whole mess just clean it up?
      Because that's just one person, and we, the common people, the Audrey's and Ted's need to help. For I doubt that Once-ler just stood by and let everyone else clean up once the ball started rolling. He would have joined them, he could clean it up if it wasn't himself. It's easier to do something with lots of people than by yourself, after all.
• Ted might've had his happy ending handed to him on a silver platter, but Once-ler worked hard for his own, both good and bad.
  • Where the heck is the rest of civilization? Or the rest of nature, for that matter? The once-ler cut down a single forest, and now there's one city left on earth and they have to pay for air? Are they on some kind of island, cut off from the rest of the world?
    • Isolation. Practically every single person is completely sold on how perfect Thneedville is, and why would you want to leave your perfect home? O-Hare probably dissuades any one who shows any interest in what's beyond the wall, like how he tried to threaten Ted into staying inside.
    • That may be why the people in Thneedville don't know/care about the outside world, but what about how the outside world knows about Thneedville? There's clearly evidence of a world outside of the Truffula valley, yet nobody in the outside world questions why there's a single town in the middle of a dead wasteland completely enclosed in a giant metal dome? Do people ever move to Thneedville? Do the Thneedvillians have friends or family outside of the town? Why haven't any outside authorities stepped in to arrest O'Hare for being a polluting dictator?
    • My impression is that Thneedville exists in a world of isolated city-states with long-distance travel being uncommon and no central authority. The rare traveler passing by Thneedville either can't get inside or is turned away by (or works for) O'Hare.

I'm Pretty Sure You Broke at Least One Law

• The Onceler tells the Lorax after his Villain Song that he hasn't broken a single law. Yet in the song, it says "the lawyers are denying." Even if there's no Environmental Protection Agency or enviromental regulations, he created a fake charity during the song, which is illegal fraud.
  • Yep. The Once-ler's song is in part about how he doesn't believe he's evil, and his "I'm not breaking any laws!" claim is part of his self delusion.
  • Furthermore, the "Lorax Approved" scene is False advertising and Unlawful represention. Either the laws in that world are much more lax, or the Onceler leveraged his wealth to avoid conviction, and considers this the same as not breaking any laws.
    • It's possible that Loraxes aren't considered people, legally-speaking. He might be considered a mythological being which most people don't accept exists, which would mean the commercial would be assumed to be some sort of CG or someone in a suit or whatever; with the courts not accepting the existence of an actual Lorax, it would be like saying your fish are endorsed by Posidon - obvious puffery and therefore not actionable. And the Lorax seems unlikely to bother navigating the court system to prove his existence and then press his claim, even if he was aware that he could.

Thneedville sky?

• Where does that sunshine-y sky end or begin? Is it a real and controlled environment? Is it just one big virtual sky on hundreds of screens (like Planet Jackers, haha)?
  • A large fan is seen. It's being used for kite-flying but maybe its main purpose is to blow away smog? Of course, that means it would also blow away clouds and towns need rain to survive, but maybe O'Hare or some other person gets water from out of town and purifies it.

The Once-ler's distant house

• Why the distance from the Once-ler's house? Realistic town growth assumes his factory would be smack-dab in the middle of civilization, like a railroad or port-town. And if it's so far away, how did they keep the 'thneed' part of the town name? Did O'Hare just round up and shut off the town after a number of years?
  • I think maybe they renamed the previous town Thneedville. The Once-ler wasn't building a new town, but improving on an old one.
  • It's also possible the town hasn't been doing much growing since the Thneed factory shut down.

Birdbrained Birds

• During the part where Once-ler's bed is floating down the river with a young bar-ba-loot stuck on for the ride, why didn't one of the swans just fly over and airlift the bar-ba-loot to safety?
  • They wanted to save them both.
  • Maybe the swans' wings aren't strong enough to carry the weight of a bar-ba-loot cub.

Suicide

• I know it's ridiculously dark, and for this obvious reason it would NEVER come up in a kid's movie of all things... But I have to wonder... If onceler was so shame-ridden and filled with self-hate that he planned to spend the rest of his life locked away... why didn't he just, y'know...pull the plug..?
  • He was waiting for someone who cared a whole awful lot, or course!
  • A couple of fanfics have speculated that part of the Lorax's curse was leaving him unable to die.
    • That would explain how he could survive so long in the wasteland with no apparent source of food, water or clean air.
    • It also might mean that he gets to spend eternity with the Lorax. Y'know, for the fangirls...
  • He felt he needed to safeguard the last seed until he could find someone responsible to entrust it to.
  • You can be in a pretty bad mood without being suicidal.
  • He wanted to make amends, which required staying around and working on finding or cultivating a perfect seed.

Why Not Do it Yourself?

• Maybe it was explained in the story, and I just forgot, but why didn't the Once-ler just plant the seed himself all those years? It's not like the ground around him was completely unable to grow the trees, as we see at the end.
  • My guess is that he thought he would find some way to screw it up again.
    • I can understand Once-Ler from the book possibly cutting it down as soon as it grew, but movie Once-Ler?
    • Even if he wasn't going to cut it down, he might have been worried he would screw up some other way - maybe he sees himself as a Walking Wasteland and thinks that after all he's done to nature, plants wouldn't grow for him. Also, maybe it took that many years for the pollutants in the ground to clear up enough for the soil to be fertile again. Plus O'Hare could have started attacking his trees when he figured out what Once-ler was doing, and he wouldn't have been able to fight him all by himself. If Ted and the whole town are dedicated to watching after the seedling there's less chance of sabotage.
    • So in other words, a Batman Gambit
  • If it's really the last seed, that means it's the last shot, the only shot, at ever resurrecting the truffula species. The Once-ler may have been so scared that it might die soon after germination, leaving him to deal with the guilt of the trees' extinction twice, that he never quite worked up the nerve to try. Alternately, he originally had several seeds left over (few tree species produce seeds one at a time), but the ones he'd tried to plant kept expiring from the lingering pollution in the soil, leaving him with a single survivor he didn't dare use.

The Forest is the Only Thing He Didn't Bigger

• Why did the Once-ler cut down every single tree without, y'know, planting a few more? Since his business relies on the continued presence of the trees, he could have harvested some seeds and planted new ones as each tree was cut down. And maybe made half of the forest off-limits/protected. That way, he could have kept his promise to the Lorax (sorta), and he would have more raw materials to make more Thneeds.
  • Most likely he got too swept up in his new-found wealth to think about preserving any of the forest, and too impatient to wait for new trees to grow.
  • This pretty much reflects what happened many places that provided timber in the early 1900s. Earning them the nickname "Stumptown".
  • Even if he only realized the problem after cutting down the last tree, the Onceler still could've collected seeds. Considering how often we see truffula trees fruiting, there should've been a lot more than one seed lying around.
  • Alternatively, he could've made some kind of arrangement with the Lorax, where the Lorax would allow the Once-ler to cut down some trees, but would set a boundary, and once that limit is reached, he wouldn't let the Once-ler cut down any more trees at least until the population reconstituted itself.
  • He didn't realize he had to; the while point is that he was short-sighted. The Lorax also says that Truffula trees take ten years to grow to maturity, which (while not particularly long for trees) might be too long for the Once-ler's purposes, especially with his family breathing down his neck demanding more. There's even a line in Biggering (an a more subtle implication in How Bad Can I Be) pointing out specifically that once, he could have been happy with just his cottage selling just a few Thneeds - replanting the trees and restricting himself to a rate that keeps pace with that would have required keeping his ambitions and growth reasonable, and if he were capable of that he wouldn't have been destroying the entire forest anyway.
  • In addition to the possibility that he just didn't care until too late, it's also possible Truffula trees don't grow fast enough for this to be sustainable given the demand. Just because a resource is renewable doesn't mean that it is renewable at the rate the market demands it. This is why eg. we can have drought and water crises even though the water cycle continuously replenishes it - you have a certain amount of water or new growth or whatever in a certain area, and if demand exceeds this, you're in trouble. You can do some things to improve the situation (dedicate more land to growing trees and planting them aggressively, say), but sometimes you just can't make up the difference. As another example, this is why it's almost impossible to get mahogany legally in the real world - hard wood like that can't be grown fast enough to meet demand, so if you just let people cut down existing old growth freely there would quickly be none left.
    • The seed Ted was given got one drink of water and sprouted in minutes; I don't think the rate at which the trees could regrow was the issue.

No Sense of Direction

• The big showdown is in the square "In the middle of town", but Ted hijacks a bulldozer and knocks down the Thneedville wall which is right nearby. I guess "middle of town" is just an expression in that the "middle" would be so close to the edge.
  • Yeah, they probably meant "middle of the town" in that that's where everyone gathered, the busiest part of town.
  • It's more like a "town center" , which isn't necessary at the of the town , but a center of activity.

How Did the Machines Reach?

• How did the tree-chopping machines get to the trees on the hills by the waterfall?
  • The brothers probably cut down any that were in places inaccessible to the machines. Indeed, that last seed might've come from a tree that was growing in a really hard-to-reach place, and was ignored long enough that it died of natural causes with a batch of seeds still clinging to it.

Why Does Ted Care?

• Why is Ted inspired to change the way things are by the Onceler's story? The actual environmental destruction is glossed over in favor of a story about the Onceler betraying his best friend. It's mentioned, albeit briefly, that the animals had to leave the valley, but since Ted is living in the rather nice Thneedville, there's no real reason for him to care about that. Why does he suddenly want to bring back free air?
  • Well, wouldn't you be peeved about having to pay for something you could get for free? But in all seriousness, I believe that's Ted motivation to plant the seed comes from three different factors by the end of the film. 1) He still wants Audrey to get the tree, though arguably it's the least important one by the end of the movie. 2) He realizes that Thneedville is not the utopia the citizens believe it to be, and wants to stop O'Hare from taking advantage of their situation and all but imprisoning them inside the walls and 3) He has this weird sort-of-not-quite-friend-but-maybe relationship with Once-ler, and wants to help him to repent by planting the seed for him.
    • The lesson in the Once-ler justifying destruction isn't directly related to what Ted needs to avoid doing: justifying doing nothing. The Once-ler's story still gets across that Things Should Be Better, which is what Ted needs to know.
  • In regards to the segment glossed over; it's highly unlikely Ted actually heard that part of the Once-ler's story in the form of a musical number. (Though that would be cool and not entirely out of character.) So assuming the Disney Acid Sequence was a distilled synopsis for our benefit, maybe the Once-ler really did articulate that part of the story.

Where Did Audrey Learn?

• This one has been bugging me since I watched the film. How exactly does Audrey know about photosynthesis? The whole town believes that they have to buy air (except O'Hare, but he seems smart enough only to capitalize on the situation) and trees were extinct by the time Audrey was born. So how does she even know that trees create oxygen, let alone that it's called "Photosynthesis"?
  • Audrey tells Ted that she read about trees in a book at the beginning of the movie, even painting them on the back wall of her house. She probably learned about Photosynthesis from that book.
    • Why would such a book exist in Thneedville? If O'Hare is that determined to keep selling his air, why would he allow books that tell people there's a better way?
  • What makes her assertion really strange is that Photosynthesis DOESN'T create oxygen, it just creates energy for the plant. The word she was looking for was respiration. But points for knowing something fairly close.
    • Actually, while the primary purpose of photosynthesis is to use light energy to convert water and CO2 into glucose, photosynthesis is the process by which plants produce oxygen, albeit as a byproduct of the sugar-making process. Respiration, on the other hand, is the opposite of photosynthesis: using oxygen and glucose to create a chemical reaction, producing energy for the plant and producing CO2 and water vapor as a byproduct.
  • O'Hare is powerful, but not omnipotent. Nothing we see indicates that he was capable of exerting absolute censorship over every book printed in or imported to Thneedville. And even if he were, he likely wouldn't realize he has to - after all, the situation we saw continued for years with nobody disrupting it despite the presence of the books in question. Especially since even if someone knows about photosynthesis, so what? The knowledge is useless without seeds for plants capable of growing in that region, and O'Hare probably thought they were extinct.

No One Knows That the Grass Never Grows?

• Why doesn't anyone in Thneedville know about the state of the terrain outside of the city? O'Hare appears to be a teenager at the end of the Once-ler's story. Thneedville wasn't populated at the end of the story, though, so everyone who lives in Thneedville must be new arrivals, aside from the children. Why, then, does everyone seem to be shocked at how things look like outside of the walls?
  • It depends on how long they've been in there, and how bad it was initially. Plus, as discussed earlier in the film, O'Hare is actively making the air worse so that more people desire to buy his air.

Why Don't More People Know About Trees?

• Why don't more people know about trees and how they produce oxygen for free? Shouldn't there be lots of old people around like Granny Norma who'd remember the trees, especially since the movie takes place roughly 30-50 years in the future (implied that Once-ler's story takes place during our present), when healthcare would be better and people would live to be older. And even if the toxic water and air would keep people's lifespan around 80-100, there still would have to people from their 60's to their 90's who'd have some distant memory about trees and their purpose.
  • Even if they did remember, O'Hare and his company seem to have a pretty good PR team plus a lot more money behind them, so they probably could have just distracted the general populous and made them ignore the old people.
  • Judging by their clothes, the flashbacks likely took place around the 50s-60s. Maybe they did remember, but either weren't bothered by it or were afraid that O'Hare would find out, before Grammy Norma finally told Ted the truth.

Why is the Once-ler Shipped with Everybody?

• This is more about the fans than the actual movie. Did I miss some sort of grand fandom decree that stated, "Lo and behold, the Once-ler shall henceforth be shipped with every fictional character that ever walked the earth"? Why him?
  • Probably stems from just how Adorkable the guy is.
    • It's the mustache.
  • Because he's cute but the only people in his canon story he could be shipped with are a small furry orange nature spirit and... himself.
  • People ship everybody with everybody nowadays.

Doing in the Dirtbag

• So, Mr O'Hare. The townspeople effectively killed him. Even if he didn't crash and die outside the city...it's a barren fucking wasteland. He'd starve to death.
  • (Maybe he becomes a sort of Once-ler 2.0?) Assuming cartoon physics keep him from dying in the crash, the townspeople are fixing up the wasteland, which is an unspecified level of remote and, other theories on this page aside, can apparently support an individual. Also, despite losing his power and status in Thneedville, nothing actually indicates that O'Hare isn't still situated in terms of wealth.

Marie's Unusually Articulate?

• I don't know many 3 year olds that can string together a sentence as well as Marie can.
  • Hey, maybe that was the start of O'Hare's problems. Too many smart people. Although it could've been from the pollution in the same way the one kid became bioluminescent.
  • Well, Cindy-lou Who was two...
  • Also, the only things she said on her own, definitely not just singing along to everyone else, goes like this.
    My name's Marie and I am 3
    I would really like to see a tree
    Lalalalalalalala
    I say let it grow.
  • Really? I thought three was the age where they can say sentences properly after spending the previous year mastering it.

Going Around the Gorge?

• I don't understand how Ted could get back to Thneedville from the Once-ler's house if there's a huge gorge in the way. He might just go around it, but we have no idea how big the gorge is.
  • I'd assume the same way he got past it before: by going through it. The real question is, how'd he get back into town after the incredibly complicated route he used when O'Hare welded the control pad shut?

How Bad Can Knitting Machines Be?

• Given that thneeds are made from truffula tufts, meaning leaves, and the Once-ler creates the first one by knitting, why is the factory (which should be just a vast collection of knitting machines) so polluting?
  • Possibly he burned the Truffula wood as fuel, which would produce particulate smoke, ash and tar. He obviously would have consumed a LARGE amount, as several million trees were cut down over several years.
  • There may likely have also been chemical treatments for preservative purposes, to clean out bugs and sanitize, etc.
  • Top Hats were made by curing beaver pelts with mercury. You probably don't want to know what went into those Thneeds.
  • Maybe it's the tree-cutting-down machines that pollute, not the thneed-making ones?

Why Cut them Down?

• In fact, why does he chop down trees to harvest the leaves? You don't harvest apples by chopping down apple trees.
  • It's explained in the film - his family doesn't want to pick the fluff little by little, so they cut down the entire tree.
    • Surely they didn't need to chop down the entire thing. Perhaps near the top of the trunk where you can get the entire fluff without destroying the whole tree.

Why Does the Once-ler Want a Snail?

• What would the Once-ler want with some pocket change and an old snail?
  • Dedication?
  • Or that's just a story people say about him and he really doesn't need snails? Alternatively, snails are an important part of the truffula forest ecosystem (well, bar-ba-loots eat the fruit and leave seeds around, so snails might have another task to fulfill)? Or it's just Rule of Funny.

Where's the Money?

• What happened to all the Once-ler's money? He went from multimillionaire to a recluse living in a ramshackle piece of his factory, wouldn't he have had enough money left to at least provide a decent standard of living for himself?
  • Maybe he had already put most of his money back into the company, so when it went so did most of his wealth.
  • Or he did have the money but since he realized what that money had cost him he chose to go back to living like a hermit as penance.
  • He could have spent his fortune scouring the world in vain for more truffula trees, or at least more seeds, in hope of undoing the damage.
  • It still would have been finite. We don't know exactly how much time has passed but it's at least been a few decades. Unless he made some investments in the mean time that would have provided him with a steady source of income, his money would still run out eventually. Either the poor living conditions were an attempt to make it stretch as long as possible, or the movie takes place when he was already close to going broke.
  • Given the Once-ler's personality, he probably was not fiscally responsible. Instead of saving money for a rainy day, he likely spent it as fast as he made it - or even faster, borrowing against future earnings, since his income kept increasing and he would assume that was going to continue forever. When his business crashed, he kept his lavish lifestyle going until he went bankrupt. He's lucky to still have the house.
  • Another possibility is that his mother took all the money remaining with her when she left.

Blaming Only the Once-ler

• People have complained about the blame getting taken away from the Once-ler and put on his family, but aside from one scene, the whole movie behaves as though it’s his fault and his fault alone, with him saying “It’s because of me”, “Everything I’ve done”, “What I’m doing”, and “Nothing is going to stop me”. And why was he the only one to get punished if they didn’t want it to be his fault? Was there originally meant to be a scene where he firmly crosses the Moral Event Horizon?
  • It might have looked like this.
  • I think a part of it is because having the Once-ler place all of the blame on himself even after we saw that it was his family who'd done the most damage makes the audience feel even more sorry for him than before, because he's taking responsibility for something the movie doesn't suggest he did firsthand - thus, he's coming off as too sympathetic and pitiable. In the original animated short (which I've never actually seen), we see that he feels sorry for what he's done, but sympathy for him feels earned in that sense because he did do wrong in that version and it really was his fault and he expresses the need to repent for it.
    • Even so, his constant Jerk Justifications and general Jerkassery during and after his song indicate that he's still not a character we're meant to side with, at least for a time. His "Who cares?" lyric implies he's aware of the situation to some degree. If he was truly a moral person, he could have done practically anything other than what he did.

Not So Hypocritical

• The way people think this movie is hypocritical all because they used paper to make the posters and advertise it...Why is that such a huge-omungous deal? I've seen so many other eco-friendly movies, and never once have I seen an argument akin to this one about any of them. Whether the film was good or bad is another story, but doesn't it seem like some peoples' nostalgia is getting in the way of their rational thought in some ways?
  • It's not hypocritical just because of the fact that they use paper for advertisements, but it's also because of the 70 corporate tie-ins despite the fact that the movie is very anti-corporation.
  • Well, for the paper part, one could always link it the accidental aesop of reforestation and sustainable logging. There is nothing wrong with using the paper itself, the problem comes in replacing the trees that were cut down in the first place (And those who refuse to do it out of greed or laziness like the Once-Ler)
  • Recycling does exist.

How Does O'Hare Purify the Air?

• How does O'Hare refresh the air? Aside from removing pollution, only a plant could turn CO2 back into Oxygen. The best theory I can come up with is that he has some sort of hidden greenhouse where he grows Truffula trees in secret.
  • There are other methods of turning CO2 into oxygen. They require energy inputs (as do plants), but they're quite real.

Strong on Confusion

• How do some characters in the show have ridiculously high strength? Audrey knocked Ted on the floor, Once-Ler could carry a Truffula Tree with only his bare hands without much effort, and Bret and Chet threw a Barbaloot miles away from them, again with their bare hands. It's even weirder when all the four of them are scrawny.

What About Normal Trees?

• We all know the Onceler chopped down all the Truffula trees, but what happened to the regular trees, which also disappeared?
  • There were no regular trees in that forest, and it wasn't the whole world that was polluted, only the place where the forest was. As for Thneedville, they might've cut down the regular trees there as well to make way for the town.

How Nonsensical Can the B Vs Be?

• OK, so apparently the chanting in "How Bad Can I Be?" goes "buy, sell, trade, squash, pork, fat, cut, smash, short, coal, oil, war." What the heck?! I know "buy, sell, trade" is obvious and "war" could be poetic, and "oil" could be what the schloppity-schlopp is made of but what are the other words supposed to mean?
  • "Squash" and "smash" could refer to how thneeds are made (by squashing the truffula tuft). "Pork" means using public money for one's own benefits, implying the Once-ler did that with the money he earned.

How did Ted get back in Thneedville?

• The first time Ted gets out, there's a built-in exit with an access ramp on the other side, so no problem getting back in. The next time, he has to jump on the wall from a nearby building because the exit is sealed. How the hell did he get back inside the wall??

Where did the local people get wood for building?

So the Onceler cutting down one single tree instantly summons the Lorax, throws the animals into depression and causes them to perform a whole ceremony and generally act as if it was the worst thing to ever have happened to them. Alright...so where did the people already living in the region get wood for building houses? The move both establishes that there are no other types of trees in the region and that there's people living there. And when the Onceler tries to market his thneed to the locals, we see that they have houses, wooden park benches and even a gazebo.How did they get lumber for all of that without calling forth the Lorax and giving the wildlife a heart attack?

• They probably just imported it. Or it could be fake wood.

Where are all the leaves that Mayor O'Hare mentioned?

• During the speech that Mayor O'Hare was doing about the dangers of trees, he mentioned leaves that just fall anywhere. During the scene where the truffala tree was growing, there were two tiny leaves that dropped and did not come back later as the plant grew. During the film, I did not see any leaves on the fully grown truffala trees. That would mean that the truffala trees would only appear to grow two leaves per plant throughout their entire lives. This would be a tiny and therefore manageable amount of leaves to work with.
• Also it's entirely possible O'Hare had never seen a full-grown Truffala to begin with: the fake trees in Thneedville mimick "normal" trees.

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