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

Prince Lír, son of King Haggard, who is supposed to be the mortal enemy, comes to the kitchen to consult Molly, who is now the castle cook, about his courtship to the Lady Amalthea, and joins the unicorn’s side. But the twisted structure that King Haggard sees all of this leaves the usual romance category.

The man who drove unicorns to erase them from the world was King Haggard, a villain, endowed with both the best intelligence and sensitivity to admire the beauty of unicorns. Lady Amalthea’s slowness to take any action in spite of reaching her destination leads to King Haggard uncovering his secrets and inviting the end of the story. The phases of the one who takes the action and the one who should be prepared for it are reversed and become one. If one is ready to acknowledge this twisted narrative composition, it will be possible to understand anew the peculiarity of the fictional phase achieved by the animated film The Last Unicorn, as a derivative work.

The protagonist of this story was supposed to be the unicorn, but since she is an eternal being that transcends comprehension of humans, she was in a way an uncomfortable character the reader cannot help feeling alienated from her judgments. The person in the work who should be closest to the reader’s feelings is the wizard Schmendrick, who is always vainly struggling in search of his ideals. He is actually qualified to be the protagonist of a fictional world, whose life has been bound by prophecy and destiny. Through the union with Molly, the character who embodies the contrasting phase and exemplifies the complementary relationship between shadow and main body, Schmendrick is the embodiment of meaning structure of personality deeply rooted in narrative implication. Occupying the position of a typical villain and embodying the highest point of human intelligence and mental strength is King Haggard, who takes on the role of a villain. In fact, in a sense, it may be said that this old tyrant has the most affinity element that appeals to the reader’s feelings. It is this avaricious stoic who occupies the peculiar fictional phase that perfectly connects with another impressive villain, Captain Hook, who occupied the central axis of Peter and Wendy. (note)

note:
For the viewpoint of considering the image of a hero who has the twisted fictional phase represented by the villain King Haggard as a “avaricious stoic,” see “The Avaricious Stoic: Hookian Anti-hero and Deified Ignorance of the Barren Kingdom” in Fantasy as Antifantasy (Kindai Bungei-sha, 2005). This study sparks an argument for the shadow motif introduced in The Last Unicorn, through an examination of the psychic phase maintained between the villain Captain Hook and Peter Pan.


King Haggard is voiced by Christopher Lee, the legendary Dracula actor at Hammer Production. The tyrant who employed the Red Bull to seal the unicorns sets the stage for this story and ends it with his own destruction. (note)

note:
Pointing out the inverted structure of the characters’ roles in James M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy, focused on the reversed relationship of the shadow motif between Peter and Hook, the author started the discussion of fantasy literature in Fantasy as Antifantasy, arguing about the phase of the peculiar fictional manifestation of “antifantasy.”


The original novel The Last Unicorn was able to achieve a splendid presentation of fictionality setting up the metafictional motif of “story” through ingenious narration and dialogues, but what kind of psychic mechanism may be detected behind the process of the film making, that enabled to lead these latent qualities to the extraordinary visual completion under constrained information? (note)

note:
As a cogent argument that is able to explain the revelational inspiration that contributes to the fictional creation and manifestation of synchronicity from the perspective of integrated system structure of the universe, Sky O A Darmos’ recursive universe model of similar worlds theory will be postulated, that presupposes the cosmic evolution of the “eons” repeatedly generated by the power of collective unconscious. Behind quantum mechanics will be revealed the ideological framework, of a teleological cosmogenesis that focuses on qualia formation of consciousness from a completely different perspective than the mechanistic idea of understanding all of life as a chain of purposeless causal relationships based on the principle of survival of the fittest. Darmos’ hypothesis, which asserts that the principle of selecting a more systemically meaningful combination of information is a factor governing the repetition of the creation of the universe, can be accepted as a theory that enables an integrated explanation of the source of inspiration and the occurrence of synchronicity, given that it can be applied not only to physical factors but also to the evolution through speculation and fictional creation within consciousness.
The magic power that governs all beings according to the same principle as the pilot wave formed a fictional perspective in The Last Unicorn, and it is a very interesting fact that an event that illustrates this mechanism actually occurred in the process of the making of the animated film as a derivative work. The semantic correlation manifested between the description in a fictional work and the actual creation of the derivative work seems to suggest once again the existence of the implicated order hidden in the fiction-reality continuum.


The synopsis depicts how the skull of the great hall of the castle shows the entrance to the secret passage, but in the original story, the dismantling of the sense of time stuck in reason is suggested in his words. Time is not understood as an objective physical dimension that governs everything uniformly as science presupposes, but regarded as a delusional concept that is held in the subject of individual consciousness. The unicorn’s transcendental attribute, “eternity,” is often mistaken by translating into “tremendously long time” in the constrained perception of temporal existence that is man, but in the formation of qualia in another dimension, the structure can also be transformed into various aspects, such as countless parallel worlds, infinite loops, and complexes of opposing contradictions. Einstein advocated “space-time continuum” that postulates the interconnection of time and space, but in the cosmology conceived by mystical ideas such as alchemy and ancient astrology, it is sometimes claimed as some kind of solipsism that includes all of space, matter, and the universe itself in consciousness, as a “space-time-mind continuum.” This metaphysical idea of contemplating phase space is deeply ingrained in the subcultural movement of contemporary Japan, through names such as “closed space” in The Melancholia of Haruhi Suzumiya and “individual barrier” in Fate/stay night. (note)

note:
As for the fact that metaphysical interpretations of existences and phenomena are introduced in a number of game works alongside many anime works, with a strong influence of post-quantum mechanics idea, please refer to the author’s study of the game work, “Identity of Summoned Heroes: Aspects of Psyche and Phases of Persona in Fate/stay night,” included in Existence, Phenomenon, and Personality: Individuality in Figurines, Anime and Game, (Bokka-sha, 2014), which attempts to grasp the concept of existence, phenomenon, and fictional personality with an enlarged view on subcultural movement in general. This paper examines the ontological qualities of a new kind of fictional style called video games.


In the anime version, the sound effects of the skull’s movements and high laughter are extremely eerie, and embody a particularly impressive scene. It is a very interesting part that achieved the work of scooping up the unconscious depth of the author Beagle’s mind with a sense of dowsing and intuitively reconstructing it by striking video and sound effects.

https://twitter.com/mackuro3/status/1775728816645878129

It depicts the unicorn and her followers who has overcome the physical constraints of the clock and the psychological constraints of time in order to enter the subjective dimension of meanings, together with the anti-hero King Haggard, who destroys the physical structure of the clock. It shows how one who has the highest knowledge as a magician, one who follows her innocent admiration for a unicorn, and one who is caught up in pure love find a portal to another dimension that should give meaning to life through transcendence of the laws of physics. However, Schmendrick the magician, who should have been blessed with more knowledge and abilities about these things than anyone else as a wizard, is the most behind.

During another encounter between the unicorn and the Red Bull, Schmendrick’s magic is once again exercised. Lady Amalthea restores her original form as a unicorn and regains her immortal nature. Schmendrick fulfills the prophesy, breaks the curse, and restores the attributes of a mortal human. There is no strategy or calculation, and those who follow the unicorn simply follow the course of nature and are led to the ultimate ending of the story. It is the basic principle of The Last Unicorn that everything proceeds “haphazardly.” The texture of this story is consistent with the nature of the unicorn, which is an eternal being. According to peculiar principles that have nothing to do with solving mysteries and achieving accomplishments through accumulation of efforts, the story of a unicorn settles down where it should be. Through the perspective that forms the semantic axis of a fictional work, it seems to imply the existence of a certain fatefulness that contains the totality of the universe acknowledged as the phenomenal world. This kind of law, which can be grasped as the principle of the development of the universe, is sometimes understood through the concept of “synchronicity” that provides an opportunity for the recognition of “meaning” from the standpoint of qualia formation of the subject of consciousness that individually senses it.