Sunday, January 3, 2016

There Are No Happy Endings Because Nothing Ends

The Last Unicorn (1982)


It might seem a bit out of this blog's scope, but I remember my mom asking me recently (ish) if I knew of any good fantasy or fairy-tale movies for young kids, around 5-10 years old or so. I tried to come up with some titles, and I realized that there really aren't any these days, at least not many. Almost everything I came up with was from the 80s or earlier. Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal, The Secret of NIMH, My Neighbor Totoro, The Flight of Dragons, etc. Stuff I used to watch in school. Other than a couple of international efforts (such as Thom Moore's The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea, which I plan on covering sometime soon), live-action and animated movies for young audiences seem to have fallen by the wayside in favor of CG movies like Shark Tale, Ice Age and Kung Fu Panda.

The Last Unicorn is about as fairy-tale as it gets. It is one, and it's an examination of them, as the characters know they're in a fairy tale and defy many of the cliches one expects of them. A unicorn overhears a couple of hunters talking as they walk through her woods, and ventures out to see if she is in fact the last of her kind. Stories say that King Haggard has captured or killed all the others, having driven them into the sea using the Red Bull (yeah, there's really no way to hear some of this dialogue now without snickering), a fiery monster he keeps under his castle. She ends up captured while she sleeps by Mommy Fortuna, an old illusionist who has to enchant the unicorn with a false horn so people can see her as anything but a white mare. Most of her "Midnight Carnival" attractions are just sickly or wounded old animals enchanted to appear as mythical creatures. The only other truly immortal creature in the whole menagerie is the harpy Celeano. Mommy Fortuna knows she'll escape and kill her sooner or later, but that's what she wants - the harpy's memory of being held prisoner by her is Fortuna's own form of immortality.

Last of the Red Hot Swamis.

After the inevitable occurs and Fortunate and her henchman Ruhk are torn apart by Celeano, Schmendrick, Fortuna's pet magician, whose control over magic is wildly unpredictable, and the unicorn head off together to find Haggard's castle. In the movie's most mind-bogglingly weird sequence - and there are a lot of those - they run into a band of Robin Hood-esque thieves (who believe Robin Hood himself is a myth), their leader Captain Cully tells Schmendrick to sit down with them and have a taco, and then Schmendrick gets tied to a tree with giant boobs. It's seriously bizarre from start to finish.

Anyway, once that's done, they continue onward in the company of Molly Grue, one of Cully's band, and at last come to Haggard's kingdom and its desolate, crooked castle by the sea, which is apparently populated only by Haggard and his son Lir, a cat with a pegleg and an eyepatch, and a talking skeleton. Haggard and Lir even man the gates as their own guardsmen. The landscape, the castle and its cell-like tomb of a throne room are a clear reflection of Haggard himself, who is both frightening and pitiable - he's driven the unicorns into the sea, keeping them prisoner not out of greed or a lust for power, but because he's depressed. Looking at them is the only thing that makes him happy anymore. In order to hide the unicorn from Haggard and the Bull, Schmendrick changes her form - but she winds up a human girl, a mortal, now able to feel all the emotions of a mortal girl.

"You are losing my interest, and that is very dangerous."

I was pretty happy when I found that Netflix had The Last Unicorn available for streaming. I wore out my VHS tape when I was a kid. Even now, the beauty of this movie can bring a tear to my eye. One of the great Rankin-Bass cult classics, it's got a fantastic voice cast - Mia Farrow as the unicorn, Alan Arkin as Schmendrick, Jeff Bridges as Prince Lir, the late, sorely missed Christopher Lee as King Haggard, and a dozen others at least, plus some great songs by America and a screenplay by Peter S. Beagle, who wrote the original book. It's hard to say what still resonates with me today. The anachronisms, the dialogue, the memorably complex characters - it's one of those movies that I can watch now and still feel some small fraction of the wonder I felt when I was much younger and much happier myself. There was a live-action version in the works for a while that was going to reunite the original voice cast, but that got held up somewhere along the way, and with Lee's death, it doesn't seem like anything's going to come of it.

It gets pretty dark sometimes - Mommy Fortuna's death is hardly something you'd put in a family film these days, and the Red Bull is the stuff of goddamn nightmares through and through. Movies have come to underestimate kids since then, I think. Books, not so much, but the movie industry seems to believe that kids are downright fragile - not to mention too dull-witted to laugh at anything more sophisticated than fart jokes. The danger and the characters alike are all sanitized; Greedo shoots first, E.T. switches out its guns for walkie-talkies and so on. And you definitely wouldn't see nipples in anything G-rated now. But I think a good kids' movie should terrify kids once in a while.

Red Bull does NOT give you wings.

It's also a curious relic of animation history. It was animated by Topcraft, which was Rankin-Bass' non-stop-motion Japanese studio at the time, and most of its staff left with Hayao Miyazaki only a couple of years later, in 1984, to found Studio Ghibli. Topcraft actually did the animation for Miyazaki's Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind before that, even though that's almost always considered a Ghibli movie these days. Another noteworthy name to come out of The Last Unicorn's animation crew is Hideaki Anno, who would go on to found Studio Gainax and, in the grip of his own Haggard-like depression, create one of the most well-known anime series ever: Neon Genesis Evangelion. Maybe his involvement with The Last Unicorn explains the boob tree and the tacos, I don't know.

Available On: Netflix.

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