Week Three: The Last Unicorn

Year: 1982,

Director: Arthur Rankin Jr. & Jules Bass,

Nostalgia Score: 5/5,

Most recent watch: Several times as an adult.

Best quote: "There are no happy endings because nothing ends."

You know, for a movie with a G rating, The Last Unicorn covers some fairly adult themes, like mortality, regret, and trees with giant boobs. I've also seen this movie on several Internet lists with titles like, "10 Most Violent Children's Movies" and "15 Unintentionally Terrifying Kid's Films." And, honestly, it is pretty intense for something that's supposedly appropriate for toddlers. It also seems like the novel the movie is based on is not a children's or young adult book, as I had originally assumed. So, that may also go a ways towards explaining why it's so dark.

To be sure, the list of potentially frightening or age inappropriate content in The Last Unicorn is pretty long, but I don't remember ever finding it upsetting when I was young. Probably the weirdest part of the film is the previously mentioned tree with giant boobs, which is accidentally enchanted by the generally inept, but occasionally brilliant wizard Schmendrick. Though I suppose some parents might be upset by their kid watching a man being nearly smothered to death in the bosom of an anthropomorphic tree with the personality of a sexually liberated older woman, as a kid I just thought it was funny. I still think it's funny, mostly because Schmendrick gets himself in situation in the first place and he's very quickly rescued. The tree also calls the unicorn a "hussy" which is a hilariously outdated word, but is still kind of rude for a kid's film. In the same general category of potentially objectionable material is a scene where the audience sees the unicorn/ Lady Amalthea semi-nude after she's first transformed into a human woman. Her long white blonde hair very tastefully covers her though and in the context of the scene it's not at all sexual. While I remembered the bizarre tree boobs from childhood viewings, I had completely forgotten about Lady Amalthea's initial lack of clothing.  

In my opinion though, much scarier than any breast in the film, is the death of Mommy Fortuna, a witch who captures the unicorn for her traveling carnival. The only other genuine mythical creature in Mommy Fortuna's carnival is a harpy (who also happens to have not two, but three, human breasts). The unicorn is repeatedly warned that the harpy is violent and evil, and that she'll kill everyone if she's let out of her cage. Fortuna even gloats to the unicorn that she knows the harpy will kill her one day, but that her own mortality will come from the harpy's memories of being captured and imprisoned. That's a pretty deep, dark thought for a kid to process. True to the prediction, the harpy does kill Mommy Fortuna, practically on screen. Though the shot is cut right before the moment of impact, the harpy dives toward Mommy Fortuna, her talons extended as Fortuna holds her arms open to sky, embracing her own death with a maniacal grin on her face, while screaming at the harpy, "I held you!" And then, as the unicorn and Schmendrick walk away from the carnage ("You must never run from anything immortal; it only attracts their attention."), we see the harpy's back as she starts eating the now lifeless body of Fortuna's henchman. Anyway, it's the manner in which Mommy Fortuna knows her death and accepts it with that hateful glee in her eyes that always disturbed me the most. I never had nightmares or anything from watching the scene when I was a kid, but I didn't really understand it either. It mostly impressed upon me how evil and crazy Mommy Fortuna was supposed to be.

Something else that seems pretty unusual for a kids' movie is that the unicorn really doesn't think like a human being until she falls in love with Prince Lir as the Lady Amalthea. We're told that she doesn't have human feelings, but she actually acts like it too. For example, when Schmendrick turns her into a woman, her reaction is nearly as frightening as the harpy incident. She sobs and tells Molly Grue and Schmendrick, "I can feel this body dying all around me," and "I am more afraid of it than I was the Red Bull." Instead of feeling relieved, she is terrified, and the implication is that being trapped in a mortal body is even worse than being trapped in the ocean with the other unicorns. Whenever she speaks as a unicorn, both before she has been human and after, she seems kind of detached and talks about the truth so plainly that its almost unnerving, like when she tells Schmendrick, without a hint of sadness or discomfort, that Mommy Fortuna, "chose her death long ago."

And then, after everything else I've mentioned, we have the ending of the story. I think nearly any other kids' movie, particularly one aimed primarily at girls, would have the unicorn choosing to remain a human woman and marry Prince Lir. But in The Last Unicorn, she doesn't. She goes back to her forest and the lasting effect of her time as a human is her new ability to understand regret and love. Now, she does say that she wants to remain human and stay with Lir at one point, but that's when she's still human and clearly not in her right mind (at least, it reads to me like being in a human body is causing her to go a little bit insane). And then, to Lir's credit, once he knows that she's a unicorn, he doesn't want her to stay a woman. His answer when she says that she wants to stay with him is that, "a quest may not simply be abandoned." He loves her enough to let her go which, again, is a surprisingly complex emotional state for a character in a children's film.

I haven't even mentioned the animation which does have a few interesting properties. There's some really pretty use of color in a few scenes, particularly those with the Red Bull. There's also the character design of the unicorn, who looks a bit more like a large deer than a horse, something that you sometimes see in really old illustrations, but almost never in more recent ones. However, though the animation is good, I feel like the real stand out quality of this movie is it's nuanced emotional landscape. It hasn't sacrificed meaning for the sake of an easily digestible bedtime story. Instead, it's deep and unsettling and truthful.