When I was a child, one of my favourite films was The Last Unicorn. It was regularly played on tv on public holidays, and I had also taped it. It’s a Rankin-Bass animated film from the early 80s with Mia Farrow, Christopher Lee, Jeff Bridges and Angela Lansbury, about a unicorn and a failed magician looking for the other missing unicorns, which was co-produced by the animators who later went on to become Studio Ghibli. It was a flop on initial release, but became a cult favourite from tv reruns. It’s based on an equally cult 1968 book by Peter S. Beagle. I actually only read the book as an adult due to it not being very available in the UK when I was a child, but it’s essentially the same as the film, and a short read at 150 pages.
Peter Beagle has a very distinctive writing style that combines clarity with unusual turns of phrase and simile. Many of his books also combine fairy story plots with an intense focus on characters’ internal emotional states and relationship dynamics. The characters know they’re in a fairy tale construction and comment on how they have to live up to the story they’re in, but the prince still has to peel his own potatoes.
“The magician stood erect, menacing the attackers with demons, metamorphoses, paralyzing ailments, and secret judo holds. Molly picked up a rock.”
A combination of The Princess Bride’s post-modernism with the melancholy of the Moomin books. When trying to come up with a way to describe it, the best I could do was “it leaves you feeling a certain way”, and I’m not sure I can think of a way to re-phrase that.
Decades later, after shaking off a controlling and abusive manager and having a career renaissance Beagle released the direct sequel The Way Home, catching up with the main characters years later; and then the more loosely-related In Calabria, where the unicorn appears in our world and has to deal with the onslaught of media attention.
The vibe of the film version is similar to Disney’s The Black Cauldron, released around the same time. Both are 80s animated films that seem more like they’re from the 70s, with a medieval folklore setting, slightly scratchy Xeroxed line art, and a darker and more melancholy tone, which were commercial flops in the cinema (and both source books feature princes called Lír/Llyr). The Black Cauldron however is a so-so adaptation of Lloyd Alexander’s excellent books, with much meddling from Disney. The film of The Last Unicorn is much the same as the book, aside from shearing off some subplots with townspeople, because Beagle wrote the screenplay (along with that of the cartoon of Return of the King). It also manages to add some aspects only possible in a visual medium, such as the medieval tapestry design of the introductory credits.
Aside from its dark tone, and all-star cast, the film is also known for its catchy, but somewhat cheesy folk-prog soundtrack written by Jimmy Webb of Wichita Lineman fame, and performed by folk duo America. In particular its dramatic theme tune with the chorus “I am aliiiiiiiiiive”. In May 2023 I was in a Spar supermarket in Graz, browsing the snacks, when the theme tune unexpectedly came on the in-store radio. I have a video I took just standing laughing like an idiot in front of a a shelf of Haribo with The Last Unicorn theme tune playing over the tannoy just because I couldn’t quite believe it was happening.
When I left the supermarket and walked back to the hotel, along the way there was a new bookshop on the square, which hadn’t been there on my previous visits to Graz. Unlike the average extremely disappointing Austrian bookshop, it had an excellent selection. In the window was a handsome German hardback edition of The Last Unicorn book. Fate was telling me to buy it. I told the owner of the shop that I was just in Spar, and they were playing the theme tune, but she had no idea it was a film. She had just ordered it for the shop because it looked like a cool book. I ended up with a matching hardback volume of The Way Home in German as well.
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