imagine your icon having sex with the expression they currently have
how do you talk to a cute ask blog w/out telling them how much you hate them and to go away idk how to do this tbh
I really like a lot of things about Onceler’s design, but holy shit is he ever tall.
It’s a fairly simple trait, but they got so much out of it. He towers over everyone, people and animals alike, but it really sets his body type apart from the cute, stubby baby animals. He somewhat resembles a tree, too, with the horizontal stripes on legs that make up 70% of his body.
He also kind of resembles the iconic wonky, tall, twisty buildings Seuss’s style is famous for, associating the new him with the old Lerkim everybody knows.
And look how he uses it. He’s bendy as hell and expressive like you wouldn’t believe. He has body language out the wazoo. He’s incredibly well conveyed in the parts of the movie where he’s just some arms and a pair of eyes, so with a entire body things are even more fun.
The main point his body makes is that he’s a casual, pliable, lanky guy with some awkwardness in there. Once-ler throws himself around quite a lot, thrashes about, gets on one knee, dances and wiggles and a lot of things that establish him as easygoing and sympathetic. From the moment he starts out, given an overly joyous goodbye by his family, his sheer height points him in the direction of somebody who’s never really fitted in. His body is too big to be taken seriously in the same sort of way as his rising ambition gathers his family’s scorn.
He also gets into weird positions and his elongated limbs are played for laughs, to help us see him as a ridiculous blunderer like the people in Greenville do.
The point is he’s silly and his body is silly.
But once he puts on his suit, that changes. He doesn’t flail around, he moves with purpose. He’s not awkwardly lanky, he’s suddenly doing what his own business does - instead of bending down, falling over, sitting on one knee for conversations with the Lorax, he stands up straighter than ever and makes the world conform to him, like he tries to force the truffula valley to conform to the unsustainable demands he makes of it.
Everything has to be bigger - taller hallways, enormous doors and an office you can’t see the top of. Like everything else he does, wanting his absurd height to be provided for goes into crazy amounts of overcompensation. He’s quick and sure-footed, he can prance down to the end of a suspended steel girder and take Seussian stairs two at a time, direct and elegant.
The flipside of his height comes into play all of a sudden. Tall people are imposing. Tall people are models. Tall people have a lot of body to show off, rather than letting it be a source for humour. The hat is just accentuating something that now wants to be noticed, instead of before where Once-ler would crouch and bend to accomodate others, now he won’t make any excuses for himself.
His size is emphasised to the point where he’s depicted towering over the trees and everybody too small to matter to him any more. He’s not just uncaring, he’s actually gotten so big that he just can’t see the same things that he used to care about. He’s not an awkward outcast, he makes the rules now, he’s a pinnacle of industry and lofty goals and reaching for the stars and all those other metaphors that involve height coming true, but which forget to mention how far you’ll have to fall once you’ve got there.
It’s really interesting how many ways they used a simple thing like a character’s height - his body never actually changes inbetween those two stages. He always has the means to be both, it’s the same body and the same person, but how he chooses to carry himself makes a lot of difference.
![hislivinglegacy:
bring home the boys in scraps. [x]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/2575da394db34a5622bda9700b96df48/tumblr_mmuy3nErcX1qhi3nco1_500.png)
lacycakes said: don’t be ashamed shOUT IT OVER THE ROOF TOPS!!
digs a hole in the ground and hides
here take this w/ u
