Unacknowledged Virtue of The Last Unicorn: 4 Storyboards and Notes on Japanese Scenario

4 Storyboards and Notes on Japanese Scenario

The Last Unicorn was supposed to be a quest story of the unicorn with a mission to find her lost friends and defeat the villain and the fell monster Red Bull, the enemy’s co-conspirator. However, when she arrives at the destination, King Haggard’s castle, with her followers, it is not a life-and-death battle, but a beginning of a somewhat out-of-focus love drama, contrary to the pattern of typical fantasy stories. Neither the villain nor the monster plays the typological narrative role that would have been expected. Prince Lír’s actions, who has been awakened as a knight at the sight of Lady Amalthea, are told as a mockery of the normal romance procedure, which is the subtleness of anti-fantasy that the original novel attempted to perform. This is a difficult part to process without making a mistake, but in the finished anime, miraculous visual expressions are achieved in several parts.

The storyboard, which depicts the background of the chorus sung by the rock band “America” formed in the UK, juxtaposes the shadow of a unicorn that has fallen on the surface of the sea with the shoal of narwhals swimming in the sea, creating an interesting visualization of the contrast between the false image and the real entity. From the notes attached to the storyboard, it can be discerned that this idea was due to the writing of the scenario that Beagle was in charge of. This extremely impressive shadow expression introduced in the anime was conceived by the original author Peter S. Beagle himself.

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An English note on the storyboard for the next scene mentions that the bird perched on the castle wall is the same one that took seat on Mommy Fortuna’s hat. This character, which did not appear in the original work, seems to have been invented by the author Beagle himself. However, in the America’s chorus playing in this scene, it is sung “magpie flies.” In the original scenario, the bird was supposed to be a “magpie.” The magpie has long been believed in Europe to be the disguised form of a witch. However, the figure of the bird on the screen has been changed to that of a crow. The exquisite arrangement of this part shows a unique contrivance in the formation of the theme achieved by Topcraft. This crow is subtly depicted on the screen in other scenes that are not mentioned in the scenario, and makes the key to the accomplishment that tightly folds the theme of the shadow motif. The operation of ingenious transformation of the bird points to the contact between Beagle’s idea and Topcraft’s staging strategy, which can be discerned by contrasting the description of the scenario with the notes on the storyboard.

https://twitter.com/mackuro3/status/1775521120944640253

The job of the romance hero was to slay the monster. It is customary for them to take the head of the monster they killed and offer it to their beloved princess as a “trophy.” However, Lady Amalthea, who was a unicorn, is not moved by such things. It is this episode that overturns the norm of the romances that aggregates the values of the masculine principle, and reconstructs it with a flexible judgment that reflects the feminine principle.
The dragon that Lír slays is pictured like a dinosaur with wings in the storyboard, as commonly conceived in Western legends. The scenario also describes it as “a dragon that looks exactly like typical Western folklore.” However, in the finished version of the anime, for some reason he is changed to the form of a “Ryu” (Chinese and Japanese dragon), one of the Eastern deities.

https://twitter.com/mackuro3/status/1775522034363379992

This is the part that shows the result of Topcraft’s original arrangement. It was written in the scenario that the dragon exhibited at the midnight carnival spectacle was “in the form of a Chinese dragon.” Topcraft staff may have tried to expand the description of this part.

https://twitter.com/mackuro3/status/1775522991973212518

According to legends passed down through tapestries kept at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Cluny Museum in Paris, the unicorn was a symbol of the masculine principle, the guardian of the established power of royalty. It is the subtlety of the original novel that changed this legendary existence to a female unicorn. This is where we can find an important fictional meaning construction that supports the perspective of the original novel The Last Unicorn. The twisted verbal description introduced in the original work is reflected in the background depiction of King Haggard’s castle, achieving a splendid visual comparison, which must be acknowledged to be the mastery work of Topcraft. Behind the figure of Lady Amalthea, fierce unicorns are shown as told in legends in the great hall of the castle.

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In the finished anime, folded figures of imaginary and real unicorns are constructed by arranging a mirror image that presents Lady Amalthea, who is a real unicorn in human form, and legendary unicorns depicted in tapestry. How this visual contrast was conceived was something I had always been interested in. This is because it is understood as a most remarkable visual expression achieved in the anime The Last Unicorn, which deserves high recognition, reflecting the theme of the original work in its own peculiar way.

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The “Lady and the Unicorn” tapestry, often cited as the source of the unicorn legend, is also hung on the wall of the Great Hall. This tapestry expression was used in the opening of this anime and was also used in the ending scene of Topcraft’s next film, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. For this reason, The Last Unicorn is deeply related to Japan through Topcraft.

https://twitter.com/mackuro3/status/1775525120079278224

　The exquisite creative strategy employed in the original work, which attempted to dismantle the relationship between the real and the false, reality and the non-existent, in order to liberate the ability of intuition that discovers the shadow of truth in delusions and dreams, was an excellent feat that could not be seen anywhere else. The storyboard seems to show the traces of the hard work in tackling metaphysical visual expression.

https://twitter.com/mackuro3/status/1775695565709623433