Bystander Syndrome: The Once-ler says 'Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better.At least one British edition of the book lets the line remain, too. However, the line is kept in the 1972 TV version (it is spoken by one of the Humming Fish), even in the VHS and DVD releases. Bowdlerise: The Lorax's line 'I hear things are just as bad up in Lake Erie' was removed from the book in 1985 after two research associates from the Ohio Sea Grant Program wrote to Seuss about the clean-up of Lake Erie.Notably, the Once-ler gives no justification for his Thneed business beyond his slogan that everyone needs Thneeds, making it clear that he didn't really care about his business impact beyond lining up his own pockets. Black-and-White Morality: The Lorax is white and the Once-ler and his family are black in this moral dilemma.Big Bad: The Once-ler, whose greed ruins an entire ecosystem.To put it into perspective, even the bad guy himself is horrified at his own victory. His last act is to give the person who is listening to the story a Truffula Tree seed so that the forest could one day return. The Atoner: The Once-ler at the end, when he has time to think of what his business had done to the environment.The Once-ler took those words to heart and realized that unless he did something to reverse the situation, nothing was going to get better. Arc Words: UNLESS, the words that were printed on a pile of stones that the Lorax was standing on before he left.It is unclear over whether that's supposed to be clothing or his natural skin/fur color, though the Illumination adaptation interprets him as a human who wears green gloves. Ambiguously Human: All that is seen of the Once-ler are eyes and some green hands and legs.Allegorical Character: The Once-ler and the Lorax represent unchecked capitalism and industry and the preservation of nature respectively.After the End: The boy discovers the Once-ler long after he has destroyed the forest.Affably Evil: The Once-ler is pretty nice when you're not on his bad side.You know, the ones for which The Lorax speaks. A feature-length film from Illumination Entertainment was released in 2012, with Danny DeVito as the title character. The Lorax was adapted into a TV special in 1972 by De Patie Freleng Enterprises. It is an environmentally-oriented story about a person named Once-ler (shown only as a pair of green arms) who caused devastation to the land and was constantly scolded for it by a creature called the Lorax, whose warnings the Once-ler had ignored until it was too late. The Lorax is a story written and illustrated by Dr. Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing's going to get better.

The lorax story