In this column, we’re looking back at the 1980s as their own particular age of fantasy movies—a legacy that largely disappeared in the ’90s only to resurface in the 2000s, though in many ways, the fantasy films of the Eighties are far weirder and less polished than what we got in the aughts. In each of these articles, we’ll explore a canonical fantasy movie released between 1980 and 1989 and discuss whatever enduring legacy the film has maintained in the decades since.
For a more in-depth introduction to this series of articles, you can find the first installment here, focusing on 1981’s Dragonslayer. Last time we looked at Rankin/Bass’ chimeric cult classic of magic and science, The Flight of Dragons; this time we are looking at another (far more sublime) clash between the ancient and modern, The Last Unicorn.
Like most millennials, I saw The Last Unicorn on a rented VHS sometime in my early childhood. I wouldn’t read Peter Beagle’s original novel until college when it was recommended to me by my then-girlfriend, who adored it. By the time I was reading Beagle’s exquisite prose on a train headed from Parma to Ravenna, the cartoon was settled lore, a thing so deep in my DNA that I could not look at it quite right. It felt like a deep and foundational seam of my personality. And, judging by the responses to this film over the last forty years, it got into the bones of a whole generation. So, let’s discuss…
Based on Peter S. Beagle’s 1968 novel, the 1982 film follows the same plot, more or less. The titular Unicorn, upon learning that she is the last of her kind, sets out to find her missing kin. Along the way, she finds allies in Schmendrick the Magician and the medieval equivalent of an aging gun moll, Molly Grue; eventually they arrive in the lands of King Haggard, who has trapped the other unicorns in the sea, where they are guarded by the menacing Red Bull. To protect her from the Red Bull, Schmendrick turns the Unicorn into a human woman. Disguised as the Lady Amalthea, the last Unicorn begins to forget that she was ever an immortal being and falls in love with Haggard’s ward, Prince Lír.
Molly, Schmendrick, and Amalthea search for the location of the Red Bull and discover that it has driven all the other unicorns into the sea so that the melancholy Haggard can look upon them every day—they are the only thing that has ever made him happy, so he has hunted and hoarded them. Amalthea becomes a unicorn again and finally defeats the Bull in a desperate battle. The Unicorns are freed, Haggard and his castle tumble into the waves, and Lír bids a heartfelt farewell to the woman he loved. Molly Grue and Schmendrick ride off together into the sunset and the Unicorn returns to her woods, no longer the last of her kind, and having experienced love and regret during her time in a mortal body. The film was released in a small number of theatres, made a modest but disappointing profit and then went on to do what most Rankin/Bass productions did: finding a devoted audience on VHS and laserdisc.
So…is The Last Unicorn any good? Does its hallowed reputation live up to the hype conjured by our collective childhood nostalgia? Yes, for the most part! It’s far from a perfect film but it has more than enough charm, pathos, humor, and style to make up for its minor shortcomings.
Let’s talk about the bad first. The film does drag in the second half. For every incredible ten-minute vignette, there are long stretches where very little happens. There are several songs performed by the British-American rock band America that are fantastic—the soundtrack was composed and arranged by songwriting legend Jimmy Webb, and the eponymous title track is an absolute folk rock classic. There are another two songs, however—one sung by Katie Irving (performing for Mia Farrow), and a duet sung by Irving and Jeff Bridges—that are pretty terrible. Irving in particular sounds off-key, which is surprising given that she was ostensibly hired because Farrow herself could not sing. But honestly, that’s about the sum total of the movie’s shortcomings, and its high points far outweigh its weaknesses.
A lot of credit is due to Beagle’s writing. He adapted the screenplay from his novel and is surprisingly not precious about his own work. The original novel feels deeply postmodern, constantly self-analyzing and deconstructing its own fantasy tropes. His film adaptation is played straight, to its vast credit—trusting in the power of its own mythos and preserving enough of Beagle’s purposely anachronistic humor to entertain without ever veering into self-parody. So many of Rankin and Bass’ screenplays were written by the far less talented Romeo Muller (who scripted both The Flight of Dragons and The Return of the King), and the difference in quality is painfully apparent when compared with Beagle’s work.
The cast is also phenomenal. Surprisingly stacked for a small release, it features Mia Farrow as the Unicorn, Alan Arkin as Schmendrick, Christopher Lee as Haggard, Jeff Bridgesas Lír, and Angela Lansbury as Mommy Fortuna. The real power player, however, is Tammy Grimes, who imbues Molly Grue with an energy both jaggedly tragic and pragmatically resigned. She is the emotional heart of the film and manages to be a standout even among an incredibly talented cast. Incidentally, Asa West’s incredible essay on the character (right here on Reactor!) says more about Molly Grue than I have space to in this essay and is well worth your time.
Through a combination of Beagle’s writing and stellar performances from Grimes, Farrow, and Lee, the film never flinches away from being about eschatological grief and the impossibility of reclaiming a lost golden age. There is an elegiac sadness in Molly Grue and Haggard both that makes the characters feel uncomfortably close to one another, despite the fact that they choose entirely different strategies for coping with their grief. The film’s sorrowful bona fides are deeply felt, even if children drawn to the story might not fully comprehend those aspects until they’re a bit older.
It’s also a beautiful film. While the animation itself is occasionally a bit clunky, the designs are gorgeous. Lester Abrams, who also was the lead character designer on Rankin/Bass’ The Hobbit (1977) and Return of the King (1983), gives his characters a charming, quirky strangeness reminiscent of Brian Froud and clearly inspired, at least in part, by Norwegian NyForm troll figurines. The landscapes have a stylish Mary Blair quality that feels both modern and classically fantastical. Some of its most breathtaking artistry comes at the very beginning, during the opening sequence in which animated versions of the Unicorn Tapestries appear over America’s haunting, hopeful theme song, setting a very high bar for the rest of the movie.
Perhaps the movie’s best quality (for me personally at least): it’s genuinely scary. Though it only lasts about ten minutes, relatively early in the film, the sequence in which the Unicorn is a prisoner of Mommy Fortuna’s traveling carnival, put on display before disbelieving peasants, is a masterclass in acting. From the design of Celaeno the Harpy, equal parts monstrous and obscene, to Mommy Fortuna gleeful embracing her own death (having fulfilled her life’s purpose by trapping the immortal beast), the entire sequence is frightening effective in inspiring both abject fear of an immortal monster and good old fashioned existential dread.
So, given how marvelous The Last Unicorn is, what are its lasting impacts? It obviously influenced a generation of fantasy fans and, like all the best entries in this column, helped to pave the way for the explosion of high fantasy content that we’d see in the 2000s. On some more specific notes, it seems absurd to assume that it did not contribute, in part, to the creation of the previously covered Legend (1985) and its unicorn-centric fairytale plot. Even the design of Tim Curry’s iconic look—huge and devilish in red makeup and prosthetics, sporting gigantic horns—feels like it may have taken some unconscious inspiration from the Red Bull.
Speaking of the Red Bull, while the Thai trucker elixir that became the internationally popular energy drink was called Krating Daeng (which translates, roughly to “Red Bull”), I personally refuse to believe that the choice to go with that direct translation didn’t have at least something to do with the fiery antagonist of this film (even if Haggard’s creature didn’t have wings).
On a less specious note, the look of Haggard’s lonely, crumbling castle by the sea—hewn out of dark stone which sometimes takes on the appearance of tormented faces trapped in the rock—feels like it must have partly inspired George R.R. Martin’s descriptions of Dragonstone, a similarly lonely seaside castle covered in monstrous stone visages (the HBO shows radically changed the look of Dragonstone into something, in my opinion, far less interesting).
As we’ve discussed before, Topcraft, the studio that had animated The Hobbit, The Return of the King, The Flight of Dragons and other Rankin/Bass productions, would eventually be reborn as Studio Ghibli after a bankruptcy in 1985. You can absolutely see some of that iconic studio’s stylistic roots as they’re taking shape in The Last Unicorn. And some of those design sensibilities also feel like they were reflected back by popular culture over the next few years. The Unicorn’s smooth, doelike visage feels like a precursor to the distinctly unhorselike beasts of late ’80s megahit My Little Pony (based on an American toyline, but animated by Japanese and Korean studios). And there is something in her long-limbed grace (and beast-to-human transformation) that feels like it is paving the way for young audiences to adore Magical Girl anime series like Sailor Moon which hit American airwaves in the decade following.
But what do you think? Is The Last Unicorn as important a staple of your childhood as it was in mine? Do you have a lifelong fear of fortune tellers or a penchant for sexy trees as a result? Let me know in the comments, and be sure to join us next time as we pivot from a towering work of children’s animation to an iconic live-action film that contains at least one element that is decidedly not for children: 1986’s Labyrinth!
I love the book more, as it is more rich and nuanced. May help that I read the book before the movie existed. But Tammy Grimes’ performance of “How dare you come to me when I am this?” moves me to tears.
This is one of the two things that have stuck with me, the other being “But I am a cat, and no cat anywhere ever gave a straight answer.”
Same here. I was probably 11 or 12 when I first read the book, and saw the movie in the theater when I was in high school.
I saw the movie before reading the book, too – but while I love the movie, it’s the book’s prose that makes this story an all time favorite for me. I think it’s best re-read about once a decade; at different points in your life, different character arcs stand out to your eye. As a child, it was the Unicorn I loved the most. In my 20s, I fell in rueful love with Schmendrick’s horrible immortality. In my 30s, it was Molly Grue’s bitterness that *now* was when the Unicorn came. These days…I can understand Haggard’s reasons, his need to keep the unicorns, even though it’s still clearly wrong. I get it now in a way I didn’t before, when I was younger.
The movie loses a lot of all that, but then it kind of had to. There’s just not time. But it does every character justice, and if I reread the book and then rewatch the movie, the points I loved at every stage with every character are still there.
I saw the movie first, when I was ten or eleven? Loved it, of course. Christopher Lee did his own dubbing in German as Haggard. Read the book later, also loved it. And I had the soundtrack album.
This movie had an enormous impact on little me and, yes, it was a VHS rental tape. I once wondered why my parents never bought me a copy of my own and then realized that, by renting it, they could sometimes have a break from it by pretending someone else had rented it first. Devious parents.
When I finally read the book many years later, it was just as affecting and haunting and hilarious and sad. Even as I feel more like a Molly most days than a Lady Amalthea, this movie reminds me that that is more than okay. There is beauty and hope and strength in all things – if you just keep your eyes open and truly see.
I can’t hear the Last Unicorn song without crying. Same with Bright Eyes from Watership Down. Do modern movies have the same emotional impact on today’s kids as these movies had on us? (I don’t have kids, so I need parental feedback.)
I also saw the movie as a child long before I read the novel. I became obsessed with unicorns and to this day still have an affinity for them. The odd part is I was also a goth teenager. My mom used to tell me she didn’t understand how a unicorn loving kid became a goth teen. I think the answer is how scary the movie is! That is part of what I loved about it.
And so now I’m a mid-40s adult who still wishes she was more goth but has a unicorn stuffy as an emotional support (for when my dog doesn’t want to cuddle)!
A very powerful movie indeed.
For a rarer collectible check out the comic series done for it that Peter S. Beagle was involved. I think it had 12 issues.
Great choice of nostalgia and a lovely write-up. Thank you for remembering this one.
My parents rented the movie for me when I was six, assuming that an animated movie about a unicorn was child-friendly. By the time they realized it wasn’t, I could not be pried away from the TV with a crowbar. It’s not exaggerating to say that this movie rewired my brain–the concepts of “the happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story” and “…of course, that’s exactly what heroes are for” still reverberate through me. I taped a Saturday afternoon matinee onto a blank tape that I purchased with my own allowance, and that VHS tape went with me to college and to my first apartment, until I could buy a DVD player and the official helping-Peter-Beagle DVD. When I finally got my hands on a copy of the book at age 13, much like Tyler, it didn’t quite “sound” the same as the movie and it took me a while and a reread to love the text, if in a different way than I love the movie.
The animated Unicorn remains my ideal for what a unicorn looks like. Not a horse, not a deer, not a goat, a little of each and all its own, and beautiful.
(Thought I posted here already; evidently not).
I first read The Last Unicorn when I was about twelve years old, give or take, and I was captivated by the opening sentences:
“The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. She was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam, but rather the color of snow falling on a moonlit night. But her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she still moved like a shadow on the sea.”
More than forty years later, I still remember them almost by heart, even though I have probably not re-read the book for twenty years.
(I still own a copy – not the first one I read, which was a library book, but the first and only one I bought, although it is currently boxed up in our attic following a home renovation.)
At the time, I had no idea that the movie existed, even though it came out at about the same time; I think I first learned about the movie in my twenties, and saw it first on a black-and-white TV, and then again later in color. I still prefer the book, although the film did a decent job of following it.