Here are the first stills from The Lorax including a good look at the villanious Once-ler

While my favorite Dr. Seuss book is “To Think I Saw It On Mulberry Street”, I do have a spot in my heart for all the rest of them.

This includes the environmentally cautious tale of THE LORAX. The little orange guy with the big mustache protected (“I speak for the trees!”) the trees against a greedy villain called the Once-ler. In the book, you never see the face of the Once-ler, only his rather long green arms. In these first stills from the film, you get to see him in the flesh. Yes, the flesh. The Once-ler is actually a sweet faced young man.

But why make him like that? Producer Christopher Meledandri explains, “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. 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.”

Check out Once-ler (voiced by Ed Helms) in the first image below.