Good morning, squiders! This week, in our continuing series, we’re looking at the Last Unicorn. If you’re unfamiliar with the book or the movie, the book was written by Peter S. Beagle and published in 1968, and the movie came out in 1982 and is TERRIFYING.
Seriously, what were children’s movies in the ’80s. No wonder we all grew up the way we did.
My grandmother owned the Last Unicorn on VHS, and every so often, I could convince my sister/cousins to dig it out and watch it at family events. The movie is classic Rankin/Bass (think the animated ’70s version of the Hobbit) and the Red Bull was (and is, we recently rewatched the movie) unnecessarily scary. I wasn’t ever a horse child, but this movie did get me onto the unicorn train.
(There was a children’s book series called The Secret of the Unicorn Queen that I was super into.)
The movie is definitely worth a watch if you’ve never seen it, and it’s got some pretty impressive actors on it for being from the era before A-listers were the only people who could voice an animated feature. And the music is really great.
Like Jurassic Park, except even more so, I saw the movie before reading the book. I think I was…five or six when I first saw the Last Unicorn, and I probably didn’t hunt down the book until my late teens or early 20s.
But unlike Jurassic Park, I wouldn’t say that there’s a clear winner between the movie and the book in my eyes. The book is also really good! There are aspects of it that I do like better than the movie version (character personality stuff, the way some things are explained). But there are also things that are better in the movie (again, some character personalities, some other plot points, the Red Bull).
Thoughts on the Last Unicorn, squiders? Thoughts on ’80s kids’ movies?
