When most people think of the late Christopher Lee, his role as the traitorous Saruman the White probably comes to mind. At 6’ 5” and with a voice as deep the Mariana Trench, the man was born to play the cunning but careless Lord of the Rings villain. But I picture another antagonist: King Haggard, the cruel monarch who drove every unicorn but one into the sea just to cure his own melancholy.
I watched The Last Unicorn, which turned 35 on Sunday, for the first time so long ago that I can’t even remember how young I was. With two nerds for older brothers, I knew fantasy all too well. So for better or for worse, magicians and flame-red beasts roaming the night didn’t wow me like they should have. Instead, what’s stuck with me most about the film through decades of fandom are the characters’ words and the actors who read them.
Jeff Bridges as Prince Lir singing about his love for a unicorn-woman. Angela Lansbury laughing hysterically as Mummy Fortuna when her pet harpy descends upon her. Robert Klein as Butterfly, spewing jazzy riddles to anyone who would listen.
I can hear them all.
Don’t get it twisted—calling The Last Unicorn “visually breathtaking” doesn’t even begin to do it justice. Director Arthur Rankin, Jr. cemented ‘80s fantasy cartoons forever in my heart (ahem… The Flight of Dragons), and the film was animated by no lesser studio than Topcraft, the predecessor of Studio Ghibli. The Last Unicorn’s genius lies in the way the creators make subtle visual elements so core to the plot: how reflections in the Lady Amalthea’s eyes reveal her true identity as a unicorn trapped in human form; how the whitecaps on cresting waves look like unicorns cantering toward their freedom at the shore. But as gorgeous and detailed as the scenes are, they can’t tickle my nostalgia quite like the movie’s quotes do.
Like many great movies, The Last Unicorn was born from the pages of a beloved book. One of my favorite monologues happens to be a point of pride for the author, Peter S. Beagle, too. When King Haggard recalls first seeing the unicorn—and, by extension, reveals his twisted logic for trapping them all—he bellows to the Lady Amalthea:
I know you! I almost knew you as soon as I saw you on the road coming to my door. Since then, there is no movement of yours that has not betrayed you. A pace, a glance, a turn of the head. The flash of your throat as you breathe. Even your way of standing perfectly still. They were all my spies. You made me wonder for a little while. But your time is done. The tide is turning. Come and see it. Come here. There. There they are. They are mine! They belong to me!
For anyone who doesn’t know, unicorns “belong” to no one. Their very nature necessitates their freedom. But in that moment, Lee, as King Haggard, sounds like he owns them all. When he and Beagle met for the first time, the actor had just finished recording that monologue and wanted to know how he’d performed. “Of course, he’d handled the lines perfectly,” Beagle wrote in his obituary for Lee. Haggard was, in fact, one of Lee’s favorite roles — so much that he couldn’t resist an opportunity play him in another language: German. (Lee was fluent.)
As a kid, of course, I had no idea of the movie’s all-star cast. Not only were smaller parts, like those of Butterfly and Mummy Fortuna, voiced by veteran actors, Bridges asked for his role.
Despite my ignorance at the time, I could pick their voices out of other movies based on the character they’d played in The Last Unicorn. “Do you know who that is?” I’d gleefully ask my dad.
Then I’d tell him. And I’d be right.
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