Date :                    29 February 2012     

In the film, co-directed by Chris Renaud and Kyle Balda, Zac Efron voices an adventurous and romantic 12 year old whose search for a tree to gift to his crush, voiced by Taylor Swift, leads him to meet and join forces with the Lorax.  No less recognizable and actor than Danny DeVito voices the the Lorax, while Ed Helms brings life to a more substantial version of the Once-ler, who is never seen in full in Seuss' text.  At the Los Angeles press conference for The Lorax, Efron, DeVito, and Helms discussed the experience of voicing their characters, recognizing themselves in animated form, different languages, and the environmental themes of the story.

Like the rest of the cast, Zac Efron, who became a household name with Disney's High School Musical franchise, has a history with Seuss' hugely influential books.  "I started reading them in high school," he joked. "No, I have a lot of vivid memories of my parents and me reading these books. They would read them to me. It’s frozen in my mind - I can see them all. I still have them in what used to be my room, it's been turned into a spare room at my house. I’ve been kicked out. My little brother took over my room."

For Ed Helms, The Hangover star whose Andy Bernard has taken over for Michael Scott as Regional Manager on NBC's The Office, lending his voice to an animated feature was a long-term goal.  "I’ve always, since I’ve become a working actor, the idea of being in a big animated movie has held a lot of appeal and has always been something that excited me as an idea."  When it came to this specific project, Helms said, "So when I heard about this particular story being on Illumination’s docket, I kind of hunted it down and I told [producer] Chris Meledandri at gun point that he had to put me in the movie, even if it was just a bar-ba-loot or any little part. And then they came back and offered me the Once-ler and I was kind of blown away."

The Lorax marks the first voice role for Efron, who explained, "I was nervous the first time. I was a big self-conscious just because there is a camera on you and the microphone is so close. As with anything, you've just got to let go. You've just got to let go and don’t be afraid to be crazy. Danny was the one. I actually looked up a clip of Danny working on a previous project and saw how he was doing it. He’s a wild man in there. He’s a wild man! So the next time I went in there I said, 'Screw it!' I went as crazy as possible and took it to the next level. It was fun."

"It looked incredible in the 3D," Efron said of the first time he saw footage from the film. "And I thought, 'This should totally be a ride at Disneyland.' It was so neat and it was really fun. The only bad part of doing that is we had to record, literally there were entire sessions where I just go, 'Whoa! Awww! Hey! Look Out!,' for hours. They would leave it on, leave recording and I would just do every single guttural sound imaginable."

On the flipside, there's DeVito.  While ordinarily in an animated film, an American actor only records the English dialogue, and native-speakers then record other languages for international distribution, Danny DeVito took the liberty of voicing the Lorax even in international versions.   The actor explained, "I had been looking at it in Spanish and in Italian and in German and in Russian. And I dubbed my voice in all those languages. This is the thing, I don't speak any of those languages. I speak a tiny bit of Italian, but I did it all with coaches and phonetically and it was a lot of work. It was like you know something that you, once you cop to it and you say, 'I'm gonna do it, but the water's really cold when you get in it.'  You know, you go like, 'Oh my God, that mountain is high!' You're at the plateau, you say, "Okay, we can rest here," and then you look up and there's the tip of the mountain and you go, 'Okay.' We did German, we did Italian, and there's Russian. But we had a great time."

"It actually wasn't hard," he said of the unconventional experience. "The way I did it was I learned phonetically the lines first. I got them comfortable, kind of comfortable where I was making one, two mistakes it was comfortable. And then I had listened to what I had done already in the movie because I did all of my own stuff of course in the movie and then I remembered where I was in the spirit of it and the intonations and the and so it was kind of a it was fun, it was like something that's never been done before and I thought it was really cool.

To coincide with what would be Dr. Seuss' birthday this Friday; Universal is releasing The Lorax, an animated 3D adaptation of Seuss' 1971 environmental fable that depicts the differences between the titular creatures, who defends the trees of a typically Seussian setting against the Once-ler, who devastates nature for his own ends.  Previously made into an animated short in 1972, this new The Lorax from Illumination Entertainment expands the story to feature length.

In the film, co-directed by Chris Renaud and Kyle Balda, Zac Efron voices an adventurous and romantic 12 year old whose search for a tree to gift to his crush, voiced by Taylor Swift, leads him to meet and join forces with the Lorax.  No less recognizable and actor than Danny DeVito voices the the Lorax, while Ed Helms brings life to a more substantial version of the Once-ler, who is never seen in full in Seuss' text.  At the Los Angeles press conference for The Lorax, Efron, DeVito, and Helms discussed the experience of voicing their characters, recognizing themselves in animated form, different languages, and the environmental themes of the story.

Like the rest of the cast, Zac Efron, who became a household name with Disney's High School Musical franchise, has a history with Seuss' hugely influential books.  "I started reading them in high school," he joked. "No, I have a lot of vivid memories of my parents and me reading these books. They would read them to me. It’s frozen in my mind - I can see them all. I still have them in what used to be my room, it's been turned into a spare room at my house. I’ve been kicked out. My little brother took over my room."

For Ed Helms, The Hangover star whose Andy Bernard has taken over for Michael Scott as Regional Manager on NBC's The Office, lending his voice to an animated feature was a long-term goal.  "I’ve always, since I’ve become a working actor, the idea of being in a big animated movie has held a lot of appeal and has always been something that excited me as an idea."  When it came to this specific project, Helms said, "So when I heard about this particular story being on Illumination’s docket, I kind of hunted it down and I told [producer] Chris Meledandri at gun point that he had to put me in the movie, even if it was just a bar-ba-loot or any little part. And then they came back and offered me the Once-ler and I was kind of blown away."

The Lorax marks the first voice role for Efron, who explained, "I was nervous the first time. I was a big self-conscious just because there is a camera on you and the microphone is so close. As with anything, you've just got to let go. You've just got to let go and don’t be afraid to be crazy. Danny was the one. I actually looked up a clip of Danny working on a previous project and saw how he was doing it. He’s a wild man in there. He’s a wild man! So the next time I went in there I said, 'Screw it!' I went as crazy as possible and took it to the next level. It was fun."

"It looked incredible in the 3D," Efron said of the first time he saw footage from the film. "And I thought, 'This should totally be a ride at Disneyland.' It was so neat and it was really fun. The only bad part of doing that is we had to record, literally there were entire sessions where I just go, 'Whoa! Awww! Hey! Look Out!,' for hours. They would leave it on, leave recording and I would just do every single guttural sound imaginable."

On the flipside, there's DeVito.  While ordinarily in an animated film, an American actor only records the English dialogue, and native-speakers then record other languages for international distribution, Danny DeVito took the liberty of voicing the Lorax even in international versions.   The actor explained, "I had been looking at it in Spanish and in Italian and in German and in Russian. And I dubbed my voice in all those languages. This is the thing, I don't speak any of those languages. I speak a tiny bit of Italian, but I did it all with coaches and phonetically and it was a lot of work. It was like you know something that you, once you cop to it and you say, 'I'm gonna do it, but the water's really cold when you get in it.'  You know, you go like, 'Oh my God, that mountain is high!' You're at the plateau, you say, "Okay, we can rest here," and then you look up and there's the tip of the mountain and you go, 'Okay.' We did German, we did Italian, and there's Russian. But we had a great time."

"It actually wasn't hard," he said of the unconventional experience. "The way I did it was I learned phonetically the lines first. I got them comfortable, kind of comfortable where I was making one, two mistakes it was comfortable. And then I had listened to what I had done already in the movie because I did all of my own stuff of course in the movie and then I remembered where I was in the spirit of it and the intonations and the and so it was kind of a it was fun, it was like something that's never been done before and I thought it was really cool.