Product: The Last Unicorn [VHS] (1982)
Rating: 4.0
Too Bad About the Songs...
This is, overall, an excellent though, necessarily, quite simplified film of Peter Beagle's wonderful book.The animation is classic Japanese/anime style, which bothers some people but seems quite appropriate to me.The simplifications to the storyline mostly involve the town of Hagsgate and the outlaw band of Captain Cully, the Robin Hood wannabe "outlaw", but also unfortunately involve the omission of the wonderful songs that Beagle wrote and included as part of the text, which are replaced by (of all things) songs by Jimmie Webb, sung by America. (I would have awarded five stars, not four, if the soundtrack had included some or all of Beagle's original songs.)According to a story that has been confirmed by the author, Christopher Lee (who supplied the voice for King Haggard) showed up for the recording sessions armed with his own copy of the book, with several places marked to indicate things that must not, in his opinion, be omitted.All of the voices are execllently chosen -- Mia Farrow does the Unicorn/Lady Amalthea very well, indeed, Alan Arkin is wonderful as the slightly befuddled sem-competent wizard, Schmendrick, Christopher gives the perfect sad and weary reading to King Haggard, and Robert Klein is absolutely marvellous as the Butterfly.This is a story of inevitability and of the ending of things and of immortality and mortality; of heroism and villainy and of love and joy and sorrow and regret and of finding and of loss.The Unicorn must discover what it is to be human and through that rediscover what it is to be a unicorn, so that she can face the terrifying Red Bull. King Haggard's son Prince Lir (Jeff Bridges) must become a hero in order to understand that all things have their destinies and their destined endings.And Schmendrick must learn that even a wizard needs more than merely magic to be a whole person, no matter how fiercely he desires magic...The whole story is about destinies and quests and fulfillments -- "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," says Prince Lir.Wonderful and sad, uplifting and (just a little, just enough) scary, romantic and funny, this is a film for people of any age who have not forgotten the magic of the words "Once upon a time..."