cks you designed to be ~exotic~ or whatever, and those rabid jerks at Disney can only grit their teeth now!
Just saw The Last Unicorn for the first time · 11:35pm Jun 19th, 2015
A unicorn overhears from a hunter that this is the last forest where a unicorn roams. Distrought and worried, she sets out on a quest to find what has befallen the rest of her kind.
A simple plot, but the movie puts it to excellent use. My thoughts behind the cut.
A bit too high in whimsy in part for my usual tastes, even for a fairy tale style story... but man.
When it's bad it's bad, but when it's good, it's good.
When it dips its as mundane and ugly as a gaping wound. But when it soars, it frankly has some of that grace and magic of its namesake.
And I'm not a man that cries easily... but:
"It would be the last unicorn in the world that came to Molly Crow. That's alright... I forgive you."
"Of course, that's exactly what heroes are for."
"And I thank you for that part, too."
So yeah, this movie is now on the post-it note of things that make me cry if I as much as think too much about them. (The other entry on that 'list' being the ending of the game Cryostasis. Man, now is that an emotional roller-coaster.)
Highly, highly recommended. A few really bad songs and a snooze-fest of a first act aside, this is truly a classic everybody should see at least once. The characters are quite close to some rather well-used fantasy archetypes, but with enough flair and style that they work.
That, and special mention for the visuals. That poster up there is actually a near 1:1 for how the characters look in the movie proper. If you're a fan of animation as an art-form t's a joy simply to see this world move. Take the unicorn herself, for instance. You never look at her and think 'horse with a horn.' You think 'man, that's a beautiful unicorn.'
Can't even put into words how much that means for this movie's tone and feel. It really turns the vanishing of the other unicorns into an outright tragedy, a loss this world is all the poorer for, instead of 'only' a personal tragedy for the last one.
It's such a small but constant thing, but this movie would have been a shadow —if that, of the glory it actually reached, had they not nailed that bit. It really shows how important even small details can be to a work of art.
Oh, and as a small bonus to other fans, I found this: A truly excellent fan-cover of the main theme-song.
The good song of the movie, if I'm allowed to be slightly crass but honest. (1:30 mark if you don't care about the background stuff.)
Again, highly recommended. This movie deserves to be far more well known and lauded then it is.
Now, to track down the book I've heard is apparently even better...
The movie on old was great. I loved it and "Flight of Dragons" so much as a kid, for their gems of their era.
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Hmm, think I've heard about that one, but never seen it
Add one more to the pile, I guess.
3164225 its based on a book series by peter dickinson, running about 10-11 books, and is the first in the series. The animation is old for the when of it was made 1982, but does try to give it justice.
Lyra hates this movie.
But i like it, it's a pretty good movie... don't like the "magic goes away" part though.
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Definitely add it!
*chuckles*
I saw it when it first came out, and read the book when it first came out. Yes, it grips one. So much so that it pops up in several fanfics here on Fimfic. Dan's Comments mentions it, as does RK Striker. Andrew J. Talon mentions it in the addendums to his "Hands" fic.
When America did the song, they did it solid.
I think it's something Celestia would understand.
I grew up on that movie, and Flight of Dragons. They've aged a bit, but are still excellent classics that every fantasy fan should see.
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Have to admit I personally don't care at all for that trope normally, but at least in this movie it was because a cruel king stole all the unicorns away, and the story ends with them saved from him and the red bull. Bringing them, and magic, back to the world.
A small difference, but it being something the characters actively worked against instead of shrugging and going 'meh' made it far more enjoyable for me, personally.
Quite the bittersweet end, yeah, but in a good way.
3165232 True enough.
Though Lyra would likely consider it more of a downer ending since the Unicorn went back to being a unicorn and left her love interest behind to go back to being as much of a normal unicorn as she could.
"Magic do as you will, magic do as you WILL!" --Schmendric the great
I saw the movie on YouTube a few years back, and at the time we were like, "Meh.". Then that cover of the theme somehow surfaced (I think lucajin posted about it) and for some reason I had tears in our eyes! It was strange, until we watched it again. Then it made much more sense!
3167524 but she couldn't ever go back to being "just a normal unicorn". As she stated (paraphrased), she is the only unicorn in existence to ever have experienced sorrow, love, nay even what it is to be human. She no longer has that innocence, and is changed at the core for it.
I mean, think about it, if you were to experience (in the real world) true magic, could you ever think that you could go back to being a "normal human", even after said magic was stripped from your person? Many a fic writer don't seem to think so, especially on this site...
3167601 Yeah, she could not go back to being a normal unicorn but the implication was that she would be rejoining all the other unicorns and living much like she/they did before.
Man, that brings back memories. I saw that movie for the first time when I was like five years old or so. It's one of those things that are just made for children. Not in the "actually being made for children" sense, but in the sense that it has that dream-like fairytale quality to it that just sticks with you. It's the polar opposite of a Disney movie, basically - instead of a saccharine, sanitized morality play, it actually teaches you something meaningful. Like a Hans Christian Andersen story - all melancholic themes and drab colors, including those dark, brutal undertones that the oldest versions of classic fairy tales tend to have. It was probably the first movie I'd ever seen that really confronted me with death, both as a concept and by actually showing it happening.
It's not actually all that good an adaptation of the story, but somehow it still ends up being something bigger than the sum of its parts despite itself. I recommend picking up the book. It's actually a lot better than the movie and does a lot to fill in the parts of it that make the plot look so disjointed.
And yeah, the theme song is beyond amazing. I actually still remember all the lyrics, and I haven't heard it in twenty years at least.
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I'll freely admit it's one of those your mileage may vary things, but I'm going through the book right now and I'm honestly genuinely impressed with how much they nailed in adapting.
The hunters. The butterfly. The farmer. The traveling carnival. The bull and transformation. The meeting with Smendrik's old master. The king. How the prince tries to impress 'the lady...'
I've got about half an hour left on a six and a half hour audio book, and so far I've only noticed two things that were outright left out. Hagsgate and that small subplot, and Arachne the spider.
And honestly, of those two I only really thought Arachne was a shame. A normal spider dreaming that they're a cursed master weaver just really resonated with me for some reason.
Oh, that and the witch pretending to be Skuldi was a bit of a shame losing too, but I still think they nailed what a creepy but still sad old woman she was so it wasn't that great a loss to me.
Quite the far cry from stuff like The Never Ending Story leaving out half the book, so I honestly thought both book and film were the rare instance where both versions are of equal value. If for different reasons.
Oh, and not even kidding on The Never Ending Story. They really cut the story in half for the movie. The author was furious, and even sued to have the name of the movie's name changed.
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Yeah, I know, I've read the original German version. Michael Ende is something of a household name here, understandably enough. I think for being really just half of the story it's a pretty entertaining movie. Orders of magnitude better than the sequels, anyway. Honestly, I don't think the second half of the story would have made for a good movie anyway. It's too much of a radical shift in tone. The first half is by design a fairly standard adventure romp, after all, while the second half is much more introspective and about Bastian's personal self-discovery. Trying to shove both into the same movie would have ended up annoying everyone, no matter which kind of story they were watching it for.
The problem with the last unicorn is that the story just has too much subtext and nuance that is dropped in the translation. I didn't mean that it's a badly done movie in and of itself, it just loses so much that it is a completely different kind of story. Schmendrick's immortality, for example, is never mentioned at all, despite it being basically the basis of his entire character. It's pretty much half the reason why he sympathizes with the unicorn to begin with - he thinks he can actually understand her perspective because of it, and the fact that he's ridiculously wrong about that is the catalyst for more or less everything that happens after he transforms her. The unicorn in the book is genuinely alien, and a large part of the narrative is about how and why that is. For example, the whole purity and incorruptibility concepts that are associated with unicorns in mythology.
This kind of thing, for example, is more or less lost entirely. The section I quoted in my other comment is meant to illustrate it too - the harpy attacks her and she still reacts with joy, because all she sees is something that she can recognize as her peer. She isn't remotely bothered by the fact that it ends up killing at least two people, either. Unicorns can't be cruel or kind, because they are incapable of experiencing feelings like guilt, regret or love at all - they can't be less than pure because they don't have what makes us differentiate between right and wrong to begin with.
Considering that the whole exploration of those themes is what makes the novel so acclaimed to begin with, I'd say the adaptation fails pretty badly at the whole "adapting" thing. That it's kind of impossible to condense all of it down into 90 minutes of dialogue to begin with is hardly an excuse.
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Slight confession that might lose me a few artist points, but the second movie is actually my favorite in the series.
The Emptiness to me just felt as a far more credible and believable threat, and I loved the moral in how she was defeated. Hell, how many stories period are there, where the great foe admits defeat and actually honors that? If granted as a ploy while a dark artifact slowly hollows the hero out one memory at a time.
The dad's role being so much bigger. How close Bastion comes to losing. The effects.
Know I'm in minority on this, but I honestly think #2 was a worthy sequel with a lot of things to love it doesn't get nearly enough credit for.
Now, the cluster-fuck that is #3 on the other hand...
Speaking of Never Ending Story and not getting enough credit, I'm deeply saddened that the animated series seems to be all but lost to the mists of time. Wonderful show with a lot of heart and imagination, but the copyright holders seem to be intent on utterly burying it. You can barely find as much as clips on YouTube, let alone the full thing.
Might be me having experienced both as an adult, but I actually didn't get that feel. The subtext is more subtle and a bit compressed in the movie due to being a visual rather then text based medium, sure, but the movie version hit all the big beats to me.
The constant theme of memory. How alien the unicorn felt, both before and after her transformation. The characters and their motivations.
Sure, the prose was gone, but personally I felt it got a rather fair translation into equally interesting visuals and sound. And... well, that's what a good adaptation should do.
I'll grant you the immortality thing, though. That one could have gotten at least a nod or a line.
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The funny thing is, I don't even really disagree with you there. It's certainly very close to the book in terms of what actually happens and what the characters do about it. It certainly works very well as a movie too, if you look at it on its own terms. It's just different enough to halfway feel like some kind of bizarre stealth parody to me where all the characters got sneakily replaced by body-snatching pod people just before the start of it or something. The same general events occur and the characters react more or less the same to them, but the entire reason they do it is practically the opposite sometmes.
One particular example that comes to mind is the whole courtship sub-plot that happens between the prince and Amalthea. In the movie, it's pretty much treated as your average "star-crossed lovers" tragic love story. He's the chivalrous noble dragonslayer with the oh-so-tragic backstory. she's the mysterious girl he just can't have. The entire thing ends up presented as if he really just failed to be heroic enough to overcome her reluctance or something.
In the book, though, he's pretty blatantly a childish, emotionally shallow bully, who goes out and hunts down a bunch of random animals because they're look ugly to him to call monsters - and he's dead set on acting out the plot of a cheesy fantasy romance story, featuring himself as the dashing knight in shining armor. That he didn't simply fail at being a hero but was so busy with his own fantasy of himself as the protagonist of his own mental self-insert fanfiction imagination that he instead thoroughly succeeded at being the villain instead doesn't occur to him until very nearly the end of it, only barely in time to actually do something admirable and selfless for once. Neither does that the other characters spend much of the meantime looking at him with something halfway between contempt and pity for being too much of a self-absorbed idiot to even really notice, never even mind understand just why it is that Amalthea always seems rather less than happy about the body parts he brings her.
The whole section si, in my opinion, intentional mockery of the exact genre of "love story" the movie ends up making it - the kind that features very many declarations of undying love but very little by way of actual emotional depth. It doesn't actually end up making what happens all that different from the movie version, but that kind of thing was certainly enough made me think of what the chararcters do as very different from the movie.