Mortality over Legacy: An Analysis of The Last Unicorn
The Last Unicorn is a fantasy feature-length animation that studies the essence of mortality. Adapted from Peter S. Beagle’s 1968 novel of the same name, it was produced by Rankin and Bass Production in 1982 and animated by Topcraft, the Japanese studio that would later splinter to become Studio Ghibli. The film follows an immortal unicorn’s journey to find the rest of her species, and it is in representing her interactions and personal struggle with the other characters she encounters, The Last Unicorn weaves an allegorical tale about the nature of humanity and the framework of mortality. Throughout her journey, the unicorn encounters characters wrestling with their own brief lives, and after an eternity of eternal youth confronts what a mortal life truly means. As I will demonstrate in this blog post, The Last Unicorn is a complex piece of memento mori literature due to its profound and intricate explorations of death, immortality, and the essence of a transient life.
Haggard describes his motivation for capturing the Unicorns.
One of the perceived failures of Rankin and Bass’ film was that it did not meet audience expectations for what an animated movie should be, specifically an animated Unicorn movie. Before analyzing the film in depth, it is important to distinguish between the film’s depiction of a unicorn and the modern association with the creature. In recent years, The Unicorn Trend, which went viral in 2016, links unicorns to sugar, fun, and energy. Products and companies such as My Little Pony, Starbucks, and numerous fashion trends have since contributed to this craze, altering the way modern society views unicorns (Abad-Santos 2017). Within fantasy storytelling, the spectacle of riding a dragon invokes fear and freedom, and weapons forged by dwarves imply power and craftsmanship, but more contemporary interpretations have framed unicorns in altogether more ‘childish’ ways. Animated movies have, of course, been battling the label as “kid focused” since Disney’s rise to prominence. In stark contrast to these assumptions for both animation and unicorns, Rankin and Bass’ film contains nudity, murder, and sequences of terror. Further breaking from the mould, the unicorn herself takes up its symbolic mantle of purity and immortality, an association that was common for the creature in the Medieval ages. The Unicorn is introduced in her forest at the beginning of the film, an allegorical Garden of Eden. Here, the colour palette is vibrant, green, and shimmering implying life, vibrancy, and beauty. As she recounts to herself, “There has never been a time without unicorns. We live forever. We are as old as the sky, old as the moon.” By establishing this part of the creature’s mythos, the film clearly delineates her from the mortal characters that appear later in the film.
Mortality is essential to the themes that are explored in The Last Unicorn. Numerous feature-length animated films have centred their stories around death, from Hercules (Ron Clements & John Musker, 1997) to Coco (Lee Unkrich, 2017), which explore various depictions of the afterlife. Others, like Barefoot Gen (Mori Masaki, 1983) and Up (Pete Docter, 2009), also have poignant depictions of death and trauma. But The Last Unicorn is elevated by its exploration of mortality itself. The unicorn’s immortality implies that death in this world is not inevitable - conceptually introducing the theme of mortality - nor is this a death with some implication of an afterlife. The only hint of the human spirit witnessed in the film is a mad skeleton whose mania is underscored only by the tragedy of an eternity without relief. As he says between mad laughter and rambling, “I have time. I’ve got time enough for all of us.” The film’s focus on mortality and the peaceful respite of death anchors its themes to memento mori.
Memento mori in Latin means “remember you will die.” Its original purpose was to encourage people, specifically early Christians, to acknowledge their earthly life's impermanent nature and to focus on the divine. The Last Unicorn examines this school of thought through the actions of numerous mortal characters. Chiefly, a keen witch named Mommy Fortuna seeks to imprint herself on immortal beings, King Haggard’s chase for unattainable youth leads to his oblivion, and Lady Amalthea’s experience with mortal salience and love teaches the beauty of life. All three of these encounters introduce the Unicorn, and the audience by proxy, to essential tenants of memento mori teachings.
Fig. 1 - Mommy Fortuna Captures the Unicorn.
When the Unicorn initially leaves her woods, she is quickly discovered by Mommy Fortuna (Fig. 1), who captures her and displays her in a carnival as an attraction. Although most other beasts in Fortuna’s Midnight Carnival are illusions, the unicorn recognizes one of the caged creatures as the harpy Celaeno, a menacing and dangerous monster. Yet Fortuna is unbothered by the danger of capturing the harpy, considering that for humans, death is inevitable. As she confesses to the Unicorn, “Oh [Celaeno] will kill me one day or another, but she will remember forever that I caught her. That I held her prisoner! So there’s my immortality eh?”. Since Celaeno and the unicorn are immortal, they will remember Mommy Fortuna forever, thus extending her legacy into eternity. Prophetically, Celaeno is freed, and the audience witnesses the brutal execution of Fortuna. According to Geoffrey Reiter, Mommy Fortuna’s problem is that “she selfishly seeks to cling to her immortality, so much so that it literally kills her” (2009, 108). In relation to memento mori, Mommy Fortuna serves as a lesson about the dangers of legacy. Embracing impermanence is the cornerstone of memento mori doctrine, and Mommy Fortuna’s inability to reconcile it kills her.
Similarly, King Haggard's relentless pursuit of immortality and his obsession with happiness symbolize humanity's deep-seated dread of mortality. When the Unicorn meets him, he presents a single philosophical dilemma by stating that “I will keep nothing near me that does not make me happy”. His castle lies in ruins, his country is barren, and he keeps no courtroom because of this. Despite his material wealth and power, Haggard is portrayed as a hollow and joyless figure, devoid of true happiness. As the narrative unfolds, it is revealed he has caged every unicorn in the ocean. He explains, “Each time I see the unicorns, my unicorns, it is like that morning in the woods, and I am truly young in spite of myself.” This desire to feel young can be equated to a fear of death and old age. By caging the unicorns, he is attempting to grasp immortality. Like Mommy Fortuna, this leads to his death when the freed unicorns destroy the castle and cast Haggard into the jagged rocks. By presenting King Haggard's fate as a direct consequence of his refusal to accept the transient nature of life, The Last Unicorn taps into the audience's inherent fear of death. It serves as a powerful reminder that our mortality is an integral part of our human experience, and that denying or attempting to escape it ultimately leads to a spiritual and emotional decay.
Fig. 2 - Amalthea protests being turned into a Unicorn if it means abandoning her love.
To enter Haggard’s domain, the Unicorn is magically transformed into a woman, adopting the name Lady Amalthea (Fig. 2). Waking shortly after the spell is cast, The Unicorn/Amalthea suddenly becomes terrified at the inescapable death facing her mortal existence. She shrieks in fear, “I can feel this body dying all around me!”. The sudden terror of being confronted with death causes this panic because although it is distant to the audience - she is in no immediate danger at that moment - it is infinitely closer to her. Mortal salience “generates a state of anxiety that triggers a defense mechanism” (Gordillo et al 2017, 286). In Amalthea’s unique state, she confronts it for the first time after centuries of eternal youth. Every other human learns death is inevitable from childhood. Initially, Amalthea wanders the castle, haunted by the fact that death is on the horizon and terrorized by violent dreams of Celaeno and Mommy Fortuna. However, as time passes, Amalthea falls in love with a prince and forgets that she ever lived as a unicorn. The love she now feels outweighs the previous fear of death she had. When the time comes to regain her true form, she protests: “Everything dies, I want to die when [the prince] dies!”. Although Haggard and Fortuna both serve as grim warnings and omens about lives of excess and obsession, the film ends with a lesson that a brief life of love and compassion has more value than an immortal life without one.
The Last Unicorn is a film about mortal salience, displaying an awareness of death and valuing life despite it. Rankin and Bass impart wisdom to the spectator on the fragility of life and the beauty of love through an epic quest across a fantasy land. The film is a dark fantasy that lives on today as a “cult classic” (Milas 2022), yet it should be particularly remembered for the way that it teaches the audience the core values of memento mori: be wary of greed and obsession, find love, and value the few fragile moments we humans are given.
**Article published: June 9, 2023**
References
Abad-Santos, Alex. 2017. “The Inescapable Unicorn Trend, Explained.” Vox (May 17, 2017). Available at: www.vox.com/culture/2017/5/17/15597954/unicorn-trend-explained.
Gordillo, Fernando, Lilia Mestas, José M. Arana, Miguel Ángel Pérez, and Eduardo Alejandro Escottob. 2017. “The Effect of Mortality Salience and Type of Life on Personality Evaluation.” Europe's Journal of Psychology vol. 13, no. 2 (May): 286-299.
Milas, Lacy Baugher. 2022. “Why The Last Unicorn Is the Best Animated Movie You’ve Never Seen.” Paste Magazine (November 21, 2022). Available at: https://www.pastemagazine.com/movies/rankin-bass/the-last-unicorn-best-animated-movie-youve-never-seen.
Reiter, Geoffrey. 2009. “‘Two Sides of the Same Magic’: The Dialectic of Mortality and Immortality in Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn.” Mythlore 27: 103-116.
Biography
Hayden Staples is a Junior Pipeline Technical Director for Brazen Animation in Dallas. He graduated from the University of Texas at Dallas, Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication in May 2023. He specializes in rigging and software development and is co-authoring a book in his spare time.