The Last Unicorn: A Forgotten Classic
Like many people who have fallen under the spell of The Last Unicorn, I first saw the film on cable television many years ago. Appearing without fanfare, it took me completely by surprise, and I watched it again and again. It was so different from the other animated films I had seen, in part because it looked like anime yet seemed so Western. Written by Peter Beagle and produced by Rankin/Bass, The Last Unicorn also presented a sophisticated story far more adult in nature than the so-called "adult" animated films also shown on cable around the same time. I watched the film, I cherished it, and I never really forgot it. Growing older, I return to the film from time to time, and I still find a freshness to it. While the film is at odds with traditional fairytales in many ways (as will be discussed later) it ironically possesses a timeless quality that is almost fairytale-like.
A quick perusal of the web pages devoted to The Last Unicorn reveals that the film inspires an incredible amount of devotion among its rather small group of admirers. It is the sort of film that literally becomes part of you after you've seen it, to such an extent that it is hard to discuss the movie at all without including a few personal anecdotes. In my own case, friendships were actually formed with other people once we learned we both had seen the Unicorn film. From what I gather, this is not an uncommon phenomenon. The devotion the film inspires in its fans is related to its message, a message in which the imperfect nature of our world should not prevent us from seeking the truth below shallow, insubstantial illusions.
Peter Beagle's screenplay, in fact, deftly sets up our expectations and then smashes or twists them. The film is, at first glance, simply a fairytale. However, very little of what happens in the film corresponds to what an audience would expect from its experience with previous fairytale movies. In a conventional story, Schmendrick the magician would eventually master his magic arts and become a respected wizard. Prince Lir would valiantly defeat the Red Bull in battle. The Lady Amalthea would possibly reject her earlier life as a Unicorn to marry Lir, just as in a series of "Animal Bride" stories from the Grimm's collection. Molly Grue would simply serve as comic relief, and the animals in Mommy Fortuna's circus would possibly break into a song in which they good-naturedly complain about their lives.
None of this happens. Schmendrick remains a bumbling character who cannot quite control the forces he unleashes. Lir is slain by the Red Bull and must be brought back to life by the Unicorn. Instead of rejoicing at being human, the Unicorn hates being confined in the body of a mortal and feels no particular love toward Lir. Molly could hardly be considered comic relief, especially after she questions why the Unicorn could not have come into her life when she was youthful. The animals in the circus are simply old and tired (except the Harpy).
In the film, Beagle portrays the world as full of deception in a complex fashion. Mommy Fortuna, for example, is the proprietor of a traveling circus full of fraudulent monsters. Among her collection is a true Unicorn; Mommy Fortuna must attach a fake horn to the Unicorn so that others may recognize her as a mythical creature. The patrons of such a spectacle are unable to see the truth of the Unicorn herself and must be shown instead an illusion. The bandits in the woods willingly follow the specters of Robin Hood's Merry Men, even thought such apparitions are obviously frauds. The Red Bull is unable to see the Unicorn once Schmendrick disguises her as the Lady Amalthea.
Moreover, not only is the world full of lies, but everyone in it lies as well. Schmendrick the magician is essentially an illusionist; creating visual lies is his specialty. The Unicorn is forced to play along with Schmendrick's deception once she is transformed into Amalthea. Unhappily, the longer she lives the lie, the less she remembers of her life as a Unicorn. Lies surround us. Lies are often a necessity. Nevertheless, lies also have the power to stifle our uniqueness and our true selves.
At this point in the screenplay, Peter Beagle could have thrown up his hands and conceded defeat. That would have been both sad and ironic, for The Last Unicorn would have been a fantasy tale with a Nietzschian moral. Instead, Beagle offers a message of hope. The world is filled with deceit, but beauty and truth are there to be found. Moreover, simply being able to discern truth from lies does not qualify us as good people; Molly Grue and Schmendrick could see the Unicorn's true form, but so could King Haggard and Mommy Fortuna. It is our responsibility not only to discover the truth, but to use that truth wisely. We can seek to enslave what we desire (as do Haggard and Fortuna) or we can appreciate it and let it guide us toward further happiness (as in the cases of Molly Grue and Schmendrick). The truth can be both dangerous and beautiful, and we may encounter either Harpies or Unicorns.
This is a very sophisticated moral, and one geared squarely at adults. By means of contrast, let's consider the Disney film Pinocchio. There are many similarities in the two stories. Both of the lead characters' journeys start with the appearance of a winged figure (a butterfly in the Unicorn's story and a fairy in Pinocchio's case). Jiminey Cricket serves as a proxy for the audience in the same way that the down-to-earth Molly and Schmendrick do. Just as the Unicorn is forced to join Fortuna's carnival, so Pinocchio is recruited into the wicked Stromboli's puppet show. Nightmarish sequences exist in both films, and include the Harpy and the creepy sideshow atmosphere in many scenes in Pinocchio. The Unicorn reacts in horror as she is transformed into a princess against her will, just as Pinocchio is horrified as he starts to change into a jackass with Lampwick. Both the Red Bull and Monstro the Whale are powerful, primal forces of nature that overwhelm the films' heroes and must be battled with wits instead of brawn. In both films, the leads are in the greatest danger when they refuse to be true to themselves. These similarities are clearly not superficial; one wonders if Beagle had Pinocchio in mind.
The differences in the films lie in their intended audience. Disney films traditionally aim their appeal at children and the child inside the adult viewer. This is why Disney films have such universal appeal. Pinocchio's goal, after all, is to become a "real little boy," suggesting that he is "trying to find himself." On the other hand, the characters in The Last Unicorn are all adults (Molly in particular is drawn to look middle-aged); in fact, there is a complete absence of any pseudo-childlike characters among the leads of the film, for even the innocent' Unicorn is a mature woman in human form. The Last Unicorn's protagonists are seeking something more intangible than "finding themselves." For lack of a better word, they are seeking integrity in their lives. At one point, Schmendrick throws his hands up and says, "I wish to God I didn't care. But I do." All of the heroes in The Last Unicorn are searching for meaning in their lives, and it could be argued that King Haggard is also seeking meaning in his life. This is a far deeper version of "becoming a real little boy" and is one that many children would probably not understand.
Rankin/Bass did not organize a massive publicity campaign to promote the film, so the message of the film is what earns its lasting respect among its fans. There were no plastic action figures of Lir and the Harpy crowding the aisles at Toys R'Us, no stuffed Unicorns, no Red Bull bookends . . . in fact not even the soundtrack album was released in North America. Even Leonard Maltin's comprehensive capsule reviews of films on broadcast and cable TV fails to mention The Last Unicorn. In short, none of the paraphernalia that merchandisers use to canonize a film such as Star Wars into Pop Culture was employed here. Part of this concerns the timing of the film; a product of the early 1980s, Rankin/Bass released it before animated films coincided with Happy Meals. Rankin/Bass subsequently proved that they could over merchandise animated product with Thundercats. As such, The Last Unicorn is a very personal experience, relatively unsullied by either pre-existing critical consensuses or over commercialization. We can safely assume that most people have seen Star Wars and Forrest Gump and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but we cannot assume the same about The Last Unicorn. Some who saw The Last Unicorn actively sought the film out, while others stumbled over it on cable TV after its theatrical release, but no one saw it because it was forced upon them.
Categorization is something that scholars have liked to do at least since Aristotle's time. By grouping like things together, we can learn more about individual components by comparing them to their group and contrasting them to other groups. We can only learn so much by studying components in isolation. Categorization of animated films is usually an easy task for fans and critics. There is Disney, and then there is Everybody Else. Disney films are easy enough to spot, although in recent years several pretenders' such as Don Bluth created Disneyesque films outside of the Disney studio system. Still, the word "Disney" represents an identifiable product, if not a special style of film making. The "Everybody Else" category includes a motley assortment of unique films such as Gay Purr-ee and Yellow Submarine. Due in part to marketing and unfamiliarity with Japanese idioms, anime stands apart from Western animation in the eyes of many fans. Following the anime explosion Akira's release in the USA created, virtually every Japanese-animated production is lumped into the "Anime" category although, to be fair, some subdivisions within that category will have to be made in the next few years.
The Last Unicorn is not included among the films listed on The Anime Turnpike and is not usually classified as anime. Nor was it listed in Leonard Maltin's otherwise inclusive Of Mice and Magic. In fact, the one long article I have on the movie is in a magazine called Fantasy Empire which focuses almost exclusively on films from England! The question is not purely academic, for The Last Unicorn has a heavy anime design. Yet unlike most dubbed anime (save Battle of the Planets), The Last Unicorn has a first-rate cast of well-known voice actors. To unravel the difficulty in deciding where The Last Unicorn belongs, we must first examine the unusual animation studio called Rankin/Bass.
Very little has been written about the Rankin/Bass studio. They supplied several animated holiday specials to American television in the 1960s and 1970s. The majority of these are stop-motion animation in the tradition of George Pal's Puppetoons, a technique more refined in the recent movie James and the Giant Peach. Examples of typical Rankin/Bass titles include Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and The Year Without a Santa Claus. Stop-motion animation frequently results in a toy-like look, which was appropriate for many of the Christmas specials. A minority of the Rankin/Bass product was cel animated in Asia. This was not a unique quality of Rankin/Bass, for most American TV animation studios have a proportion of their work filmed overseas: this includes the Warners and Disney TV programs and The Simpsons. No one would classify Animaniacs or Darkwing Duck as anime. However, the Rankin/Bass films animated in Japan have a distinctly anime appearance, and this is what sets them apart from other American-created, foreign lensed movies. The movements in Frosty the Snowman and The Night Before Christmas are stylized in the same way as contemporary anime such as Speed Racer or Astroboy. Thus a dichotomy exists between the stop-motion animation and the cel animation of Rankin/Bass.
All the content of the Rankin/Bass films to this point was heavily indebted to Disney. The storylines were similar to fairytales in that a childlike protagonist overcomes adversity through good deeds and honesty. Rankin/Bass' character design, as Disney's, dictated that heroes have rounded, childish features while villains are clearly taller and older. Each Rankin/Bass film contains a strong musical score, just as the Disney features did. Ace voice acting was also a quality both Rankin/Bass and Disney shared; Jimmy Durante was one of many well-known Hollywood celebrities who lent his voice to the Rankin/Bass features. These qualities helped to make the Rankin/Bass specials perennial favorites until the video era, when they were withdrawn from wide broadcast and instead sold as videotapes.
In the late 1970s, Rankin/Bass started producing a handful of longer, more ambitious films. These were primarily cel animated, and included two Tolkien adaptations, The Hobbit and the less successful The Return of the King. Both films were in the fantasy genre, and both were done in a clever anime style; Bilbo and the other Hobbits have round Astroboy eyes and the Goblins and Dwarves have the detailed, wrinkled facial expressions common among grotesque anime characters. These films were more serious than the holiday specials and were aimed at an older audience. They contained several songs by the Celtic folksinger Glenn Yarborough, and made use of a high quality voice cast which included John Huston and Orson Bean. While neither film could be said to have captured the essence of Tolkien on screen (they fared no worse than Ralph Bakshi's attempt), they staked out a unique style of filmed fantasy. John Huston's reading of Tolkien's poetry early in The Hobbit was particularly effective. The pacing of the films, as well as the character designs and painted backdrops, suggested a middle ground between anime and fantasy illustration.
The motivation for making these films is unclear. The 1970s, despite their recency, are a poorly documented decade in the history of animation. Studios such as Hanna-Barbera, Depatie-Freleng and Filmation cranked out a host of nearly indistinguishable series over the course of the decade, programs which were mainly artless timekillers; this was hardly likely to inspire anyone to probe the decade in any detail. In the feature film arena, however, several movies arose to challenge Disney in the box office. Mouse and His Child and Raggedy Ann and Andy, for example, may not have had Disney executives shaking in their boots, but they demonstrated that non-Disney animated films could be made and widely distributed. It's possible that the Rankin/Bass studio wanted a piece of this pie.
This was the atmosphere that led to The Last Unicorn's theatrical release in the USA. Once again, a superb voice cast was assembled. This time, the cast included Alan Arkin, Angela Lansbury, Christopher Lee, Jeff Bridges and Mia Farrow. Music for the film was provided by the soft rock group America; the result was far more pleasant than the bland Top Ten hits of the group might suggest. Unlike the adaptation of Return of the King (where the Nazgul was given a ridiculous speaking voice and Tolkien's horror was subdued ), The Last Unicorn retained many truly frightening moments. The animation was often smoother, and the backgrounds were even more beautiful than in the Tolkien films.
Further complicating the matter of The Last Unicorn's placement is Peter Beagle himself, for he filled his screenplay with Yiddish allusions that were likely obscure to non-Jewish viewers. The most blatant example of this is Schmendrick's name, which in Yiddish refers to a good-natured loser. In itself, this represents an amazing transformation from traditional unicorn myths, for the Unicorn is often used in Christian allegory as a symbol of Christ; unfortunately such a textual analysis is perhaps irrelevant to a Web Page devoted to animated films.
The sharp contrast between the film's origins and script and the film's graphics appears to have confused many of the film's viewers. On the one hand are the characters' appearances; Amalthea has the lean willowy look of such anime females as Minako from Sailor Moon or Maytel from Galaxy Express 999. On the other hand is the richly ethnic screenplay. The dilemma is clear. Should we classify a film based on its look or based upon its screenplay?
The answer isn't as clear, due to recent developments in American animated features. A few years ago I would put The Last Unicorn in the anime category. The screenplay, while not written by a Japanese and not reflecting uniquely Japanese concerns, is mature enough to set it apart from most American child-oriented screenplays. When The Last Unicorn stood alone as the only example of its type in the West, the temptation to classify it as anime was very strong.
Upon watching The Lion King again on video, however, it cannot be denied that some of the Disney studios' most recent work probably speaks more to adults than to children. The Lion King is almost Shakespearian in plot and deals overtly with the successful assumption of adult roles and responsibilities. Simba ages into an adult before our eyes, and most of the characters in the film are adults. The Lion King is stunning and possesses a psychological depth different from the classic Disney films. (We will temporarily ignore the alleged plagarism of Tezuka's Kimba the White Lion). To a lesser extent, the same is true about other recent Disney films such as Hunchback and Pochahontas , although these films are less artistically successful than either The Last Unicorn or The Lion King. In a different vein, but no less adult in nature, one can find The Simpsons, whose multi-tiered social satires require a knowledge of American culture beyond a child's comprehension. Krusty the Klown, one of the minor characters on the show, is not only a spoof of Bozo the Clown, but also of Ronald McDonald, Johnny Carson, Jack Nicholson's portrayal of the Joker (in one episode), countless Jewish comedians of the TV era, children's show hosts, and Disney-style merchandising - all tied together with the misanthropy of W.C. Fields.
Furthermore, a few American cartoons are heavily indebted to the "anime" style of filmmaking, meaning that the onscreen violence is more graphic and that the characters (particularly the female ones)lean closer to an Asian style of draftsmanship. Blurring the lines even further is the fact that the Dirty Pair, who never existed as manga creations in Japan, appear periodically in American comic books drawn by Adam Warren and that a manga version of Star Wars is being heavily hyped to American consumers. This cross-pollination also includes Japanese-drawn editions of X-Men, Spider-Man and Batman comic books. From the vantage point of mid-1998, it appears that the "anime look" no longer qualifies a film as anime, and even the source material may eventually become irrelevant.
The Last Unicorn probably now belongs in the American feature film category which, given the hybrid nature of the movie, could change at any time. This does not diminish the uniqueness of the film, however. All of the other animated films geared at least partly toward adults mentioned above were huge media hits and heavily commercialized and merchandised. This is certainly true of the Disney features, and is equally true of The Simpsons. Younger fans of the TV series may not recall that in the first few years of the Fox hit, Simpsons-related images flooded not only toy stores, but also poster shops, t-shirts, and video games; the Simpson family also appeared in a series of Butterfinger ads. Remember once again that one of the key factors in the uniqueness of The Last Unicorn was the complete absence of a hard sell. The same cannot be said for The Simpsons or, in fairness, to any of the popular anime series (at least in Japan).
The Last Unicorn deserves a wider audience, and a higher ranking in critical surveys. Should you see The Last Unicorn, you will not be disappointed by the plot, the voice acting, or the animation. How often can you say that about any other animated movie?
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