Not a Tame Unicorn: The Shocking Challenge of Beauty
The 1982 cartoon adaptation of The Last Unicorn blends genres and eras to bring the shocking challenge of beauty to the screen.
By Eve Tushnet
The Last Unicorn opens with a slow pan into a deep blue wood, a quiet turquoise and purple place with hints of tapestry and Tiffany glass. An exploratory, lightly haunting woodwind, accompanied by birdsong and a strange rumbling which later turns out to be a lackadaisical lion roar, opens out into strings, and at last into a wordless, exultant chorus. This is beauty in a particular key, calling to mind words like lilting, lovely, gentle. Appropriate for a children’s cartoon; evocative in the same way as the first line of the novel on which the film is based: “The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone.” The beauty of this opening sequence is soft and inviting—and deceptive, because The Last Unicorn is not about beauty as invitation. It’s about beauty as shock.
I was four in 1982. I don’t remember ever seeing The Last Unicorn in theaters, but it became my obsessive favorite on home video. My perhaps-exaggerated memory is that for years I would only allow my mother to brush my (long, tangly) hair if this specific movie was playing. I read my sister’s copy of the Peter S. Beagle novel on which the film is based until the covers grew tattered and fuzzy. There was no Last Unicorn merch that I can recall: When Gremlins came out a couple years later, I got two plush Gizmos and one small poseable one, but for unicorn tchotchkes I had to resort to generic supermarket sticker books with shiny rainbow horns. And this makes sense. Gremlins’s genre is horror-comedy, but it’s a much cozier, cuddlier film than The Last Unicorn. If I’d had a stuffed Amalthea (the unicorn, voiced by Mia Farrow), I think I would have been scared to touch it.
The film tells the story of a unicorn who has been alone for a very long time when she learns that all the others of her kind have vanished. “They passed down all the roads long ago,” a wandering butterfly informs her, “and the Red Bull ran close behind them and covered their footprints.” The unicorn has never heard of a Red Bull. She has never imagined that there could be a world without others like her. She fears that the other unicorns are trapped, in need, desperate somewhere and waiting for her to rescue them. And so she sets out on a quest. In the end she will free the other unicorns, who crash out of the ocean tides in a cataclysm of liberation. But she will have lost something of her own untouched unicorn nature. She will bear her contact with humanity like a cherished and unhealing wound. She will become “of all unicorns… the only one who knows what regret is—and love.”
It’s hard to think of another children’s film so intent on depicting the Burkean sublime.
Beagle adapted his 1968 novel for the screen; the dialogue is almost word-for-word from the book. The book is for adults, although I read it in grade school. Beagle’s shlimazl hero, Schmendrick the Magician (voiced in the film by Alan Arkin), brings a lightly cynical note of Jewish comedy. The book sits easily beside 1973’s The Princess Bride, genre-savvy and picaresque. The prose is intensely lyrical but punctuated with deliberate anachronism: The leader of a band of Robin Hood ripoffs, Captain Cully of the Greenwood, greets a visitor with, “Have a taco.” The book’s characters debate their own reality and the conventions of their genre with a postmodern playfulness that becomes more eldritch and metaphysical in the film.
The Last Unicorn, the movie, gains its uniqueness in part from the collision of contrasts: childhood fears and adult ones, East and West, pseudo-medievalisms and pop music. It’s marked (some would say scarred) by its era’s musical tastes; I love the songs, composed by Jimmy Webb and performed by the folk-rock band America, but those who didn’t grow up with the film sometimes find them a weak point in the otherwise timeless soundtrack. The animation is a striking blend of Western and Japanese influences. Disney’s hand can be discerned, along with nods to the Unicorn Tapestries. But the unicorn’s giant eyes wouldn’t be out of place on an anime heroine, and the many gnarled human faces and grotesque touches would be at home in films like Spirited Away. And in fact Topcraft, the animation team responsible for Unicorn, included the founding members of the Japanese children’s cartooning powerhouse we all know as Studio Ghibli.
The Last Unicorn is lush and stark, monstrous and exquisite. Its humans are mostly low-slung, with the exceptions of the villainous King Haggard and his callow son Lír. All the people look like life has been teething on them for a while. They are weary and a little foolish, and whenever they come into contact with a creature of true magic—a unicorn, a harpy, the terrible Red Bull with his body of scarlet flame—they look tiny and ridiculous. Like catfish confronting a tsunami; like a gerbil trying to talk to God. It’s hard to think of another children’s film so intent on depicting the Burkean sublime.
The unicorn glows white-hot on the screen. It seems that our touch would sully her. When Schmendrick’s magic transforms her into a human woman, she wraps her sudden arms around her naked form and cries out, “I can feel this body dying all around me!” To become one of us feels to her like a violation. The unicorn’s sojourn in a human body is a kind of incarnation and a kind of puberty, evoking fears few grade-schoolers can put into words: loss of the memories of childhood, loss of control of one’s body, new vulnerabilities—and new possibilities for love.
The sight of the unicorn is shattering. King Haggard (voiced by Christopher Lee, at the height of his powers) recalls that the first time he saw them, “I thought I was going to die.” He decided that he needed to capture them, “all of them, all there are, for nothing makes me happy but their shining and their grace.” It is King Haggard’s response to the overwhelming encounter with beauty that has emptied the world of its unicorns. Throughout the film, characters try to cage mystery, even if they know they can’t keep it prisoner forever. The unicorns are not cruel like the harpy—or, not intentionally cruel—but they are as sublime as the harpy, and they exercise the same irresistible allure.
The unicorn is what they have longed for, without knowing it, all their lives. The unicorn is all that their lives have lacked.
The Last Unicorn is a movie in which the encounter with beauty is profoundly humiliating. Every character feels it. The butterfly is a jokester, a living jukebox, until he acknowledges that he has recognized the unicorn. Then he flutters down to bow his wings before her hoof. It’s exaggerated, because the butterfly is a traveling player if he’s anything, but it isn’t fake. Most humans in the story’s world can no longer recognize unicorns, mistaking them for pretty white horses. A witch who can see the unicorn for what she is captures her and makes her a carnival attraction; in order to pull in the suckers, the witch has to give the unicorn a fake glowy horn that they can see. And yet when the rubes stop before her cage, this fake unicorn, who is also a real unicorn, evokes absolute awe. A woman holds up her baby as tears roll down her face. No one in the audience tries to free her, or protests at her captivity. They do not acknowledge any responsibility her beauty might impose on them. But they are silenced and humbled. The unicorn is what they have longed for, without knowing it, all their lives. The unicorn is all that their lives have lacked.
Again and again that moment of recognition recurs. The unicorn’s beauty is the touchstone of character. When you realize you’re in the presence of a unicorn, do you vow to rescue and protect her? (This is folly. She will laugh at you.) Do you imprison her, to keep her close while pretending to be powerful? Do you betray her? Do you burst into angry tears, clutching at your ragged clothes and snarled hair as you berate her, “Where were you when I was one of those innocent young maidens you always come to? How dare you? How dare you come to me now—when I am this?” (She won’t laugh at you for that one.)
Do you fall in love with her, as if that were the point of her?
There are two love stories in The Last Unicorn, and they diverge. Schmendrick and the hard-bitten Molly Grue (Tammy Grimes) ride off together, having found happiness long after they stopped believing in it. But Prince Lír, who loved a unicorn so much that she vowed to remain in a dying human body to stay with him—Prince Lír, for whose love the unicorn almost betrayed her entire people and left them imprisoned in the sea—Prince Lír, whose heroism she mocked, whose dragon-slaying distressed her, with whom she became a human girl who wanted normal things—Prince Lír learns that the unicorn’s beauty is calling him not to marriage but to death.
And not only death. That would be a dramatic ending, certainly, but arguably an easy one; at any rate, it would be pretty quick. Such an ending would not be true to life. As Schmendrick reminds the prince, “There are no happy endings, because nothing ends.” And so Lír dies, and then lives, and then has to go on living. He will serve his people and remember the unicorn, and she will return to her true body and go home to her lilac wood. Their love has cost them something like their innocence, something like their wholeness. They will spend the rest of their long lives (hers is longer) living out their love: acting on it, in ways that are difficult to recognize. We can imagine that they will ache with longing, and that there will also be some satisfactions for them precisely in that longing, and in the life it shapes for them. The whole world and all that they do in it will pulse with their love, like the vase that is the space between two faces in an optical illusion. And that is the purpose of their love. Schmendrick and Molly can be grateful that they have a path with more creature comforts. Over the years, we can imagine, Schmendrick and Molly will grow to be more like one another. Lír will grow to become more like the unicorn. The unicorn, having been changed by love once and decisively, will remain the same.
It’s a strange film. Its lessons are unexpected: “Well,” Schmendrick muses, “men don’t always know when they’re happy.” It is one of the only movies to have ever given me nightmares, in the years when I begged to watch it every day.
And I can see its themes running through my life like veins. The idea that beauty is a life-changing shock is one way of talking about how I came out as a lesbian; and how I became a Christian. The Last Unicorn explores the exaltation to be found in humiliation, the relationship between beauty and liberation, the slipperiness of happiness, the erotic ardor of celibacy, and even the lowly relief of finding domestic love when you thought it wouldn’t come to you. When I was a little kid roaming the children’s aisle at Blockbuster, I was always happy to pull out The Secret of NIMH or Labyrinth or 1001 Rabbit Tales or (for some reason) All Dogs Go to Heaven. But all of those movies are more similar to one another than any of them is to Unicorn. She is still one of a kind.
Eve Tushnet is the author of two books on gay Christian life, most recently Tenderness: A Gay Christian’s Guide to Unlearning Rejection and Experiencing God’s Extravagant Love, as well as two novels, Amends and Punishment: A Love Story.
