Like many people my age, my first exposure to
The Last Unicorn was the
1982 animated movie. I loved it. I watched it over and over. I think my parents got sick of it. It was this wonderful sad story of loneliness and bravery. It's full of magic and grand gestures. A young charlatan magician and beauty challenged shrew the only defenders of the magical unicorn against the evil red bull, who they eventually triumph over in beautiful bittersweet moment.
The book is much better.
While the movie did manage to maintain the spirit of the book, it failed to convey the multiple story lines and many of the more interesting facets. The unicorn is meant to be something ethereal and eternal; the spirit of spring and innocence. Innocent but not naive. Something completely immortal but of a place and only that place. And yet, curiosity and bravery pull her from her place and thrusts her out in the world where she is vulnerable. The wizard, Schmendrick, has a story line of his own, as does Molly Grue. All of these threads twined together in a fantastical story that is one part fairytale, one part morality play, and one part self-aware analysis of story structure.
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