Peter Beagle’s classic fantasy novel The last Unicorn is a literary masterpiece that goes far beyond the fascination with the fantastic. Hard to believe that the American writer wrote this profound fairy tale deconstruction wrote down on paper when he was just 22 years old.
There is already a very good animated adaptation that traumatized quite a few children: The Last Unicorn from 1982, an international co-production with animation from Japan and a script by the author himself. No wonder, then, that a lot of the original poetic text is in the film has remained and, apart from a few elements, almost no story station and hardly any characters are missing.
My eyes still water when Molly Grue, a disillusioned middle-aged woman, sees a unicorn for the first time and asks, crying: “Where have you been? How dare you come to me now?” And I still consider the iconic dubbing performance by Christopher Lee, who voiced both the English and German King Haggard, to be one of the best in the entire medium.
The forgotten fantasy remake of The Last Unicorn that shouldn’t have been
But do you actually realize what slipped through our fingers 20 years ago? Lee, who was then world-famous as the horror legend and more recently the wizard Saruman from The Lord of the Rings, would have played Haggard in a planned live-action adaptation of the book. An adaptation that unfortunately never came to fruition. “Magic, magic, do whatever you want…” This sometimes also applies to Movie Magic when it comes to what gets produced in the end and what doesn’t.
Live-action film producer Michael Pakleppa spoke of one in an interview with Cannes magazine Moving Pictures European response to the Tolkien trilogywhile Lee, as a dedicated champion of the adaptation, said it was his “personal baby – a fantasy film that I believe in with my whole being.”
Con
King Haggard in The Last Unicorn
As MovieWeb reported at the time from the now-defunct website for Continent Films’ The Last Unicorn project, actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers was cast in the role of the bumbling magician Schmendrick, while Mia Farrow (Lady Amalthea’s voice in the animated film) was set to play ally Molly Grue . René Auberjonois, who is known from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, would have voiced the wine-loving skeleton that he had already lent his voice to in the cartoon, and would also have played Robin Hood for the poor aka Captain Cully.
Murder Is Her Hobby star Angela Lansbury was also cast in the same role she voiced in the film and was set to return as the witch Mommy Fortuna. It’s rare to see so much loyalty to the OG voice cast.
Fascination with the unicorn: Something beautiful and immortal in an ugly, fleeting world
What disturbed children about the animated film wasn’t just the fiery red bull that chases the unicorns, the lovesick breast tree or the harpy that tears apart its captor who is ready to die. The Last Unicorn explores the cosmic horror of time, the existential terror of mortality, and the intangible questions of happiness and legacy. Philosophical concepts reflected in Molly Grue’s sunken eyes and the sorcerer’s apprentice’s wasted potential. But above all in the all-consuming misfortune of the old king, who once had to see something unchangeably beautiful and was forever hurt by it.
Children may not understand it all, but they feel it. They realize that there are difficult problems and mental conflicts like the fleeting nature of beauty that even the adults who crafted this story for them cannot resolve. That’s also the reason why The Last Unicorn seems completely different when you rediscover it with a few years under your belt, after the monster of time has already gnawed at you.
Concorde
The last Unicorn
Not to mention that the story is a clever meta-narrative about fairy tale clichés and fantasy tropes that are constantly commented on. This meant that Beagle was ahead of the genre of its time. Similar to the brilliant Ursula K. Le Guin, who praised her esteemed colleague for a book blurb “Wanderers in the depths of the heart that reason does not know” described.
Missed opportunities and new hopes: Not the last chance for The Last Unicorn as a live-action film
It’s hard to say today whether Christopher Lee’s death in 2016 was the reason for the failure of the live-action project or just the final nail in the coffin of a movie zombie that couldn’t get out of production hell. In any case, Beagle would have contributed the script again (he had already finished four versions) and New Zealander Geoff Murphy would direct the film at international locations. He is not only known for the sci-fi classic The Quiet Earth – The Last Experiment, but also as the second unit director of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Surprisingly, special effects guru Julian Doyle, who had previously worked with Terry Gilliam, had a real horse in mind for the unicorn and animatronics for other creatures. And this despite the fact that the Matrix films and Star Wars prequels ushered in the CGI age at the turn of the millennium, which led to films for a few years that have not aged very well in terms of effects from today’s perspective. Here you would either have been a bit old school, or you would have shown real foresight.
Video with concept art for the never-made unicorn film:
Here you will find external content from YouTube, which complements the article. You can display it and hide it again with one click.
A new attempt for a The Last Unicorn live-action film has been under discussion since 2022 (via CBR). Still with Beagle on board (the man just can’t shake the unicorn), but of course not with the half-deceased cast from before.
Unlike the case of The Neverending Story, whose Wolfgang Petersen film adaptation only adapted half of the original, a remake of The Last Unicorn is not about making up for a shortcoming. The animated film is really fantastic and, apart from the story detour to the cursed town of Hogsmeade, is almost complete.
It would just be fairytale-like and downright legendary to see an ambitious fantasy feature film again that doesn’t have to be an action spectacle… and maybe even wounds your soul a little bit in the best way.