Product: The Last Unicorn [VHS] (1982)
Rating: 1.0
When good books go bad
I should give up watching movies (or cartoons) based on books I have read.The fact that Rankin & Bass did the animation for this movie should have clued me in to its total lack of artistry, (I had already seen their version of "The Hobbit", after all).The book, written by Peter S Beagle, was an astonishingly fresh and insightful vision of a world in which a unicorn finds that she is not only the last of her kind, but that most people no longer believe unicorns ever existed in the first place. The cartoon was little more than a watered down version of the original story, lacking the enchanting prose and fairytale flavor of the original.Nowhere in the promos do they mention adult language or content, however, there is too much of that in the cartoon, which could make some parents a bit nervous. I truly would not enjoy having to have to explain to my five year old why Molly McGrue was so upset that the unicorn had not arrived sooner! The image of the Red Bull is frightening enough, not to mention Mommy Fortuna or the nightmarish Harpy. I would never recommend this for children under the age of twelve, and I would not recommend it for adults either, since most of the story's original message is lost in the hackneyed cartooning on this video.