When The Grinch is reading off the names from the phone book and saying he hates them, he's going in alphabetical order. However, the Who phone book is in alphabetical order by first name. By the time he gets to "LOATHE ENTIRELY", The Grinch could very well be at the name of his rival, Mayor Augustus May-Who.
The Grinch subconsciously singing the Whobilation carol before he wakes up and realizes what he's doing makes sense. Putting aside hearing it every year, the Grinch was still raised for his formative years in Whoville. He probably knows all the carols by heart, despite his best efforts with his "sedative" and trying to drown out the music in the present day. His initial upbringing would also explain why he occasionally speaks in rhyme, to his dismay.
Who's to say that Whoville is not the same speck as in Horton Hears a Who!, but stuck on a snowflake? It would explain why Whoville can have both warm and snowy weather.
In fact, in real life, all snowflakes, like all raindrops, form around specks of dust.
Jim Carrey's over-the-top performance as The Grinch. Think about it, he's been alone in a cave most of his life. It makes sense he wouldn't be all that right in the head. This is given weight by the fact that, as a kid (before he moved to the cave), he was (relatively) normal.
The buildings look like they were designed on acid and the proper nouns sound like they were made by someone with senility. The bizarre and whimsical world of Doctor Seuss is no place for subtle acting.
This troper has never really considered before (probably due to Furry Confusion), but The Grinch appears to be a nudist. As an added bonus, his tendency to eat beer bottles in The Movie is probably a metaphor for alcoholism. Well, I guess being an isolated hermit for more than 50 years does this kind of shit to you.
The film solves a problem I had with the book and animated adaption: why does The Grinch care so much about saving the presents when Christmas "came just the same" without them? (Although it was a nice thing to do.) In the movie, Cindy is on the sled with the presents, giving The Grinch a much better reason to save the sled. Because if the sled went over, Cindy Lou would fall over with it.
The movie says "No-one quite knows the reason", despite the Grinch getting a backstory. But when the Narrator is talking, nobody did know the reason. Cindy Lou was the first person to really try and understand him, and she had to patch it together from multiple sources.
The film gives us a more plausible reason why after fifty years of putting up with Christmas, he finally decides to steal it. The Mayor's foolish attempt to mess with him and finding out his crush is marrying another pushes him over the edge.
It also shows that while the Grinch may have changed his mind about Christmas, his dislike of the Mayor was still there when he returned with Cindy and the sleigh.
While the film gets criticized for making the Whos less sympathetic, they still seem thoroughly wholesome beings when directed properly. They quickly forgive the Grinch and welcome him to the festivities twice over, and all it takes is Cindy Lou and her father's speech about the real meaning of Christmas to destroy their materialistic nature. The only remaining antagonistic figure afterwards is the Mayor, who genuinely is materialistic and cynical, and also holds most of the power in the city (as well as being a tad of a Manipulative Bastard). In retrospect, the Whos are as inherently well-meaning as they are in previous interpretations, albeit much more impressionable and easy to corrupt (which, given the standard buffoonery in Dr. Seuss works, isn't hard to imagine).
The Grinch's ability to build things out of trash — his sleigh, etc. — is foreshadowed early on when he builds Martha May's gift using items he found around his home as a child.
The Grinch’s birthday is Christmas Eve. That means that every year on his birthday, he has had to put up with the Whos preparing for a holiday he hates, which happens to be the next day. No wonder he wants to put an end to it.
His birthday being on Christmas Eve might even be one of the reasons he hates Christmas, since his birthday would be overlooked by the upcoming holiday, as it is for many people who have birthdays around this time.
Betty and Martha stopping the runaway sleigh using Betty’s lights is the perfect conclusion for the former’s arc. After spending the whole film trying to outdo Martha with her decorations, she is now willing to work with Martha and tear down her own lights to save her daughter. Petty rivalries and fancy decor mean nothing to her now, she just wants to protect her family.
Whoville is on a snowflake. People catch snowflakes on their tongues not to mention the other things that happen to snowflakes. Just consider the possibilities how this could end badly for the Whos.
People also walk on snow. In other words, they could be stepped on. And in the event that neither happen, snow does melt...
It's ok, because time compression might apply for Whoville. In the span of the lifetime of a snowflake, (i.e. a few minutes at best) an equivalent of the Earth's lifetime goes past, in a process similar to relativity. Their eventual extinction is as inevitable and no more depressing than that of our own.
That was unexpectedly and awesomely profound. Good show. O.O
It's also on a speck of dust, apparently just stuck on a snowflake in snowy weather. Snowflakes do form around dust specks.
During a flashback, babies come to Whoville in flying baskets. The Grinch's basket knocks one of the other baskets away and, presumably, takes that baby's place. What happened to the Who baby inside?!
It probably went to Grinchville. Or something.
So that means we have the possibility of a parallel story involving a Who bringing the Christmas joy and spirit to the perpetually dour Grinchville? I'd read that.
Someone actually has written a story about that. It can be found here.
How exactly did the Grinch's moms feel when he fled for the mountains and never came back down? Think about that: Your son, who you love, has been so thoroughly ruined by his classmates that he runs away and never comes home...and by the time you see him again, he's become a nasty, bitter, deranged old hermit who hates everyone and everything.
Some Fridge Horror for the book, too: For fifty-three years, the Grinch has been holed up in his cave, loathing the joys of Christmas, but most importantly, the noise and the singing. For fifty-three YEARS. That's enough to make a person go insane. And, technically, he is! Or, at least the Whos think so.
Meta example: Jim Carey really really suffered during he filming of this movie - because he had to wear contact lenses in order to make his eyes look yellow enough. Which apparently resulted in some really dry eyes. Some of those "Weird Jim Cary Expressions" Where he squints might actually not have been intentional but him gritting and acting through the pain. (Probably also doubles as an awesome moment too.)
When you listen to the Grinch hash out his schedule as to if he can or can't go to the Whobilation, at one point he mentions "dinner with me", which he can't afford to cancel again. While it might be just a gag, that moment implies that the Grinch perhaps skips proper meals with an unhealthy amount of frequency. While he's capable of eating things perhaps not healthy to your average Who, one has to wonder just what it is he's able to find for eating that would constitute a decent meal living so close to the town dump, especially in the dead of winter.
Sadly not unlikely. It's an unfortunate truth that many animals given as gift pets around the holidays end up getting put up for adoption or straight up abandoned after the novelty wears off and the recipient has tired of the actual responsibility involved. Or after the pet in question has grown out of being a tiny baby.
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