I can't say how old I was the first time I saw “The Last Unicorn”, though I must have been very
young. I remember clinging to my parents' knees and begging them to rent it for me from the video
store while my older sister groaned because that was all I ever wanted to see. I was, according to my
parents, an intense child prone to fits of both anger or passion, one of my first passionate devotions was
to unicorns.
I could not have told you why I loved that movie so much at the time other than the fact I
thought it was beautiful and it had unicorns in it. On the surface, it appears to be a fairy standard
fantasy movie. A unicorn overhears two huntsman discussing the rumor that she may be the last of her
kind. She does not believe this is possible, but a riddling butterfly confirms that he has heard of all the
unicorns being chased from their hiding places by a monster called the Red Bull and driven “to the
ends of the earth”. She sets out to find and free them, and on her journey gains traveling companions in
Schmendrick, a failed magician and Molly Grue, a disillusioned lady outlaw. When she confronts and
fails to conquer the Red Bull, the magician transforms her into a human being in order to disguise her.
In human form she and her companions reach the castle of King Haggard, the man who controls the
Bull, and his son Lir. While they attempt to find out how King Haggard controls the Bull and where he
is keeping the unicorns, Lir and the unicorn begin to fall in love, and the longer she remains human the
more she forgets of her old life. King Haggard finally confronts the unicorn, says he recognizes her for
what she is and dares her to try to take the others away from him. By the time Schmendrick has
discovered a way to find the Red Bull again, the unicorn does not wish to complete the quest. But when
the Red Bull appears and threatens Lir, the unicorn is forced back into her old shape to save him,
successfully defeating the Bull and releasing the other unicorns from captivity. Their love now
impossible, Lir and the unicorn must part ways, though Schmendrick and Molly Grue remain together.
I would guess that I saw this movie for the first time either in the late stages of toddlerhood or
early elementary children as defined by the lecture notes in weeks four and five. This is supposedly the
time when imaginative play peaks, children begin to interact more with friends and peers, and become
able to distinguish fantasy from reality more clearly. I spent a great deal of my childhood feeling
lonely. I had few friends and often had trouble understanding why people behaved the way they did, so
the unicorn's isolation and detachment from humanity was very familiar. Not being human herself, she
has no empathy for them and regards them with a bemused indifference. She comments that people
often do not recognize unicorns even when they see them, but instead see a white mare. I too felt that I
went unrecognized for the things that made me unique and therefore completely at odds at the
expectations for me. Where during her travels she is captured by a witch who runs a carnival and
displayed as a side-show attraction alongside fake monsters, I felt a child's anger and humiliation at
being asked to “do that funny accent”, “make nice”, or otherwise perform for my parents' adult friends.
I also found the unicorn to be extremely beautiful, and from an early age I had an idea that the only
beautiful things in the world were fantastic. This likely slowed down the development of my ability to
differentiate fantasy from reality—only fantasy was beautiful in an otherwise ugly world, so I needed
fantastic things to exist.
Unfortunately many of these experiences have carried over with me into adulthood. What “The
Last Unicorn” may have inadvertently done is to create a belief that the truly beautiful things are
hidden, and that I may very well have to go to the ends of the earth to find kindred spirits. In a strange
way, it may also have taught me that loneliness and loss can be seen as beautiful, that it is extremely
rare to be recognized for what you are, and that endings may not come in the form you would wish.
These are all very adult concepts for a children's movie, though of course I appreciate them more now. I
had not seen “The Last Unicorn” for years before this project, and watching it again reminds me of
how lonely I was, even though I could not have identified my experience as such at the time. In my
identification with the unicorn rather than the human characters, I see it as a very sad movie, and that
makes watching it a mixed experience. It is strange to see my old beliefs so clearly portrayed in an
animated form, and I am almost way of having them reinforced.
Watching this movie again, it becomes very clear how much this strays from the typical fantasy
story. The setting is more low-fantasy than high fantasy; while magic exists, it is unusual and prone to
all sorts of unpleasant consequences. Schmendrick, whose name comes from a Yiddish word for
“stupid person” refers to himself as a magician rather than a wizard, and originally makes his living
doing stage-magic. While he has a talent for “real magic” like transformation, he begins with almost no
control over it which leads to some disastrous results, such as animating a tree who then falls in love
with an refuses to let him go. His initial transformation of the unicorn is something like a fluke, but by
the end of the movie he has mastered his talent and is hailed by the unicorn as a “true wizard”. Molly
Grue is introduced to us as the ladylove of a failed Robin Hood-imitator. She is jaded and bitter from a
life trying to live up to a legend and failing in every way, and when she first encounters the unicorn the
first thing she does is curse her for appearing when she's no longer “one of those innocent young
maidens you always come to.” Molly's character growth is shown in the recovery of her wonder and
faith as she becomes one of the major characters in the active fairytale of her journey with
Schmendrick and the unicorn . When we first meet the unicorn she is detached and cares little for
human beings, as they have only ever been on the periphery of her life. During her stint as a human
being she experiences emotions to which no other unicorn has ever been exposed, and so even when
she regains her true form the memory of what she felt has changed her. At the end of the movie she tells
Schmendrick “I'm a little afraid to go home. I have been mortal, and some part of me is mortal yet. I
am no longer like the others...” As a unicorn she is not mean to know human feelings any more than
other animals, but she can remember them. Unlike traditional fairytales, it is not the prince and princess
(or in this case Prince Lir and the transformed unicorn) who marry and live happily ever after, even
though that is what they wish. Prince Lir himself says that cannot happen. Since he met the transformed
unicorn and knew her as the Lady Amalthea, he has made of himself a hero, and on the way to confront
the Red Bull he tells her “Heroes know that things must happen when it is time for them to happen. A
quest may not simply be abandoned; unicorns may go unrescued for a long time, but not forever. A
happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.” This story does not end neatly. The unicorn
returns to her forest permanently changed, Prince Lir goes off to explore the world having lost the
woman he loves, and the audience has no idea what will become of Schmendrick and Molly Grue
though they have decided to stay together. In the book it is intimated that they fall in love, but there is
no mention of that in the movie. This is, in its way, a more realistic ending, just as the story has been
full of realistic pitfalls and attitudes: King Haggard's depression turns him into a grasping villain, the
outlaw Captain Cully's pursuit of the Robin Hood lifestyle fails miserably when his band of merry men
realize that the hardships outweigh the gain, and Mommy Fortuna the carnival owner is killed by a
creature she imprisoned for her sideshow.
I am uncertain how children would react to this movie today. Given that it's only a year younger
than I am, I have no doubt that one of the first thing children would notice is that the animation is not
of the same quality they have come to expect. There is no 3-D, no special effects, and has a “murky”
quality to it that films today lack. In addition, Rankin/Bass' illustration style runs towards large noses
and eyes, and pointy chins, which makes the human characters look strange. By comparison, this
makes the unicorn and the natural world the centerpieces of the story, with the rest of the characters
becoming clowns or villains. The faces of most characters are not as mobile as they could be, and there
is occasionally some lag between facial movement and words. This film assembled a cast of greats to
voice the characters, with Mia Farrow as the Unicorn, Alan Arkin as Schmendrick, Tammy Grimes as
Molly Grue, Jeff Bridges as Prince Lir, and Christopher Lee as Prince Haggard, although this may be a
fact to charm adult audiences rather than young ones. The music written by Jimmy Webb and largely
performed by America is used to fill in spaces when our characters are traveling long distances or lost
in their own thoughts. The two exceptions to this are the (unfortunate) solo “Now That I'm a Woman”
where the unicorn describes feeling the loss of her identity, and the duet/montage with Jeff Bridges
“That's All I've Got to Say” where she and Prince Lir sing about falling in love.