"Princess Mononoke" and "The Last Unicorn"

It's difficult to believe that for practically the entire 20th century you couldn't mention animation without mentioning Disney. It was the only game in town - sure, the Looney Toons over at Warners were much liked, but there was always something fundamentally unlovable about Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd. They were never a family - in nearly every Looney Toon, one character is actively trying to kill another one, and sometimes the cross-currents of backstabbing wrap themselves into spirals towards madness. How many times does Daffy betray Bugs, only to be himself betrayed? There's something dark and weird in the Warner Bros cartoons - morality is regularly undercut, laws of physics are betrayed, and characters run off the film strip with shocking regularity, a trick Bergman would borrow for "Persona."

So, if you were to go back and read the vast majority of reviews written about animated movies before this decade, you'll invariably find some reference to Disney - how the movies are different, how they are more violent, how they are less beautiful, how they are decidedly un-Disneylike. Now, of course, animation is practically more common than real-life, and there are so many different legitimately beautiful artistic options - "South Park," "Frisky Dingo," and the magnificent opening of "Kung Fu Panda" are just a few examples of how seemingly stripped down, unbeautiful animation can dazzle just as much as "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves," and with lots of funny, to boot.

Thus, I suspect it's much easier for Americans to appreciate a movie like "The Last Unicorn" (from the very early 80s) and "Princess Mononoke" (from the late 90s) for what they are, as opposed to what they are not. Because both films are many things, but one thing they decidedly are not is even remotely Disneylike.

"Princess Mononoke" is an epic masterwork, and "The Last Unicorn" is a bizarro curiosity. Both films come from creators with a genuine house style that's completely singular. Miyazaki is an unqualified genius, and his 2-D animation breathes with life - in some group shots, you can actually see people in the background inhaling and exhaling, so precise is the master's attention to detail. It's hard to describe this, maybe because it's difficult to describe what breathing looks like - your body doesn't move at all, and yet everything about it moves; your grow around the midsection, but shrink in the shoulders.

"The Last Unicorn" couldn't be more different - it comes out of the Rankin/Bass animation studio. All but forgotten now, Rankin/Bass produced practically every Christmas animation special two generations of kids grew up watching - "The Year Without A Santa Claus," "Rudolph and Frosty's Christmas in July," and of course, the stop-motion "Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer." Still, they're probably best known now in very hermetic circles of reformed nerdlingers as the company that produced "The Hobbit," the animated adaption of Tolkein's first book.

Funnily enough, though, the two films share a common DNA: "Unicorn" was animated by a studio called Topcraft, which also worked on Miyazaki's "Nausicaa" before mostly reforming into Studio Ghibli, responsible for all of his later works - "Mononoke" among them. Thus, although the two films could not look more different, there is something weirdly similar about how people move - not quite as smooth as in early Disney (say, "Snow White"), but nor as plastic as in late-period 2-D animation, with computer cels and weirdly stolid waxwork people.

It's difficult to describe the magic of watching "The Hobbit" as a child, even more difficult to describe it having watched it again as an adult. The 2-D animation in the Rankin/Bass fantasy catalogue - besides "Hobbit," they produced a version of "Return of the King," a forgotten tale called "The Flight of the Dragons," and "The Last Unicorn" - is clunky in a way that most 2-D animation hasn't been clunky in years. In old Disney cartoons, people seem to breathe; in old Warner Brother cartoons, nobody breathes because they don't have time to, because they're on the move constantly in zip-zap-zoop motions; in the Rankin/Bass films, you can see the blips between cels.

When people talk, they almost always make the same strange movement, which is hard to describe but noticeable in all their fantasy films - their eyes stay wide open, but their bodies seem to pivot back and forth, as their shoulders lean in and then lean out. You get the overall impression that they're leaning in for an important secret, but then leaning out to make a pronouncement. Nearly every line of dialogue in these films is exposition - characters are constantly explaining who they are and what their quest is, sometimes immediately before their quest ends. The echo-tunnel quality of the dialogue isn't helped by the fact that voices tend to run in three directions - annoyingly goofy (for the underdog hero), stoutly athletic (for the knight in shining armor), or high-pitched prom queen (for the inevitably angelic female characters.) One character will inevitably be voiced by one of the three most baritoned actors ever - in "Dragons," it's James Earl Jones; in "The Hobbit," it's John Huston; and here, in "Unicorn," it's Christopher Lee.

What's aged the worst, though, are the musical interludes. "South Park" parodied this strange stylistic quirk in the classic Lemmiwinks episode. It's difficult to describe the genre of music these songs fall under - they sound a bit like songs you might find in a nightmare jukebox musical about the period of history between Led Zeppelin and The Outfield. The lyrics are painfully sincere - they tend to describe the plot of the movie, but take the curious tactic of often seeming to speak directly to the characters. The fact that they're inevitably sung by performers who sound a little bit like Bob Ross only adds to the weird vagueness. This opening credits sequence captures everything awkward yet perversely wonderful about the Rankin/Bass musical interlude - immensely hummable, painfully sincere, ridiculously hokey yet eventually mythic.

The Rankin/Bass films DO hold up, viewed again for adults, largely because they go so far beyond strange into the outright surreal. Dream logic pervades everything about "The Last Unicorn," giving the episodic plot the quality of a Bunuel film that thinks it's a Ray Harryhausen fantasy shocker. At the beginning of the story, two men are on horseback inside of a forest. One man says, "This is a unicorn's forest." The other man says, "Really?" The first man points out how green and wonderful the forest looks, and then says, apropos of nothing but the movie's title, "Surely, she is the last unicorn." The men ride away.

Cut to stage right: there's our unicorn, looking uncomfortably feminine, and suddenly, we hear her brain voice, and it sounds just like Mia Farrow: "The Last? Me? Really?" The whole engine of the plot is set in motion, as she decides to find the rest of her race. However, there's a long interlude - it feels like almost half the movie - where she's captured by a witch, voiced by Angela Lansbury. The witch has a zoo filled with mythic creatures - manticore, dragon, Midgard serpent. They're all fakes, except the unicorn, and a particularly grotesque Harpy, which is half-vulture and half-breasts. After escaping the zoo, the Unicorn runs into a group of Robin Hood-like thieves, who are adamant about their non-Robin-Hood-ness. After escaping the thieves, the Unicorn, now with two friends in tow - a woman named Molly and a wizard named Schmendrick, whose attempt to prove himself a real magician forms the only significant ongoing subplot in the whole movie - finds herself in a castle with a potentially crazy old King, a handsome young prince voiced (and painfully sung) by Jeff Bridges, and, somewhere in the depths, a gigantic, massively evil thing which is and is called The Red Bull.

I should mention that, at this point, the Unicorn has been turned into a human lady. There's some talk about how, if she stays human for too long, she won't be able to turn back into a unicorn. I hope that none of this is making sense, because it shouldn't - the plot contortions are freaky beyond belief. One second, you think you're watching a movie about eco-consciousness; the next, about spirituality; the next, about libertarianism. Like a great B-Movie, "The Last Unicorn" draws a strange amount of power from its own imperfection. It sticks with you. And it helps that it gets better as it goes along - or perhaps you're just more drawn into the world.

"Princess Mononoke" exemplifies what "The Last Unicorn" barely grasps at - the ability to build an entire sense of a fantasy world out of just a few, relatively tiny settings. Middle-Earth in "Lord of the Rings" feels very believable, but only because, by the end, you've seen practically all of it - at more than 10 hours, and with an incredible amount of location photography and settings whose whole ecosystems were transformed for making the trilogy, "Lord of the Rings" feels like the pastoral counterpoint to "The Wire," so completely are its various levels mapped out. (We even get the sense for the different ethnic traits - the Horse-Lords are Aryan viking blonde, the men of Gondor are dark-haired and pale, the hobbits are small and curly-haired, and all the bad guys are black and cockney.)

In "Mononoke," after an opening scene in a tiny village, practically the whole movie divides its time between just a couple of recognizable settings - an enchanted pond in the forest, and a burgeoning city of industry at the base of a hill. "Unicorn" begins in the Unicorn's forest, and then departs through the plains, but there's no real sense of particularity - the zoo is mobile, and seems to just stop along the road; so, too, the band of thieves, who hide out in the darkness; and finally, there is the castle perched on a coastline, suggesting a bird of prey on its roosts, a suicidal feat of fascist architectural engineering, and Castle Elsinore:

It's in this castle where the movie spends its final and most strange, and most disturbing, scenes. "Mononoke" is a much better movie - almost perfect, certainly more consistent, and far more openly ambiguous - but then, you have to watch this scene, and let Christopher Lee's voice wash over you:




I admit that I'm presenting the video out of context, but context doesn't really explain anything about this scene. At this point in the movie, it's not very clear whether the Unicorn is suffering from amnesia, if she's too busy falling in love with the prince to worry about her original goal, or if her original goal - to discover what happened to her fellow unicorns - was just not very important to begin with. This scene reveals that the King is the film's villain, but nothing really follows directly from it - he receives his just desserts at the end of the film, but there's never a sense of genuine reckoning (His last words in the movie are victorious - "I knew! I knew you were the last!")

This scene reminds me, for vague reasons, of a scene from Orson Welles' last film, "F for Fake," where he meditates on Chartres cathedral, on notions of authorship, on humanity, space, time, and existence. Both films are openly episodic, the plot less a series of events than a barely linear series of riffs. Neither film makes a lick of sense. Yet both stick in your head, and both contain scenes which, when surgically removed from the movie around them, seem to contain some hidden equation for understanding something deeper.

Perhaps it's just proof of the incredible allure of baritone-voiced soliloquies. You could listen to Orson Welles in "F for Fake," Christopher Lee in "Unicorn," and Keith David in the english dub of "Mononoke," and almost imagine that this is what it must have been like for Abraham or Muhammad or Heracles to hear some higher power speaking just to him.