Word: unicorn
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JENSEN FARLEY PICTURES' animated fairy tale The Last Unicorn confirms, by default, that only Walt Disney had what it takes. Although Unicorn contains some innovatively clever characters, the piece as a whole lacks the fluidity of images, the magnificance of each character's movements, and the timelessness of plot that give Walt Disney productions their eternal appeal. Like other recent endeavors to animate fantasy books--Tolkien's The Hobbit, for example--the adaptation of Peter S. Beagle's novel The Last Unicorn fails to capture through animation all the intricacies of plot and description usually woven by words...
Much of the power of such a book, missing in the film, may stem from each reader's opportunity to form his own image of the characters. In the animated version, Beagle's fantasy unicorn becomes a stereotypical white horse with a horn. And the voices of actors reading the lines, background theme music and songs only interfere with the delicate unfolding of the plot...
...Last Unicorn, a unicorn--supposedly the last unicorn left in the world--decides to leave her magical forest to find out the fate of her fellow unicorns. She goes on an Oz-like quest to find the kingdom of King Hagerd, where the Red Bull lives. This losthsome beast has been doing something terrible--it's unclear what--to all the other unicorns, whom he is holding prisoner...
...same rolling green hills, large dark forests and blue sky with willowy clouds dominate the landscape throughout most of the unicorn's journey. Gorgeous natural occurrences make some scenes--rain falls onto rushing rapids, or an ancient castle totters over the edge of a tremendous precipice. The occassional glimpses, though, don't compensate for the monotomy of the rest of the terrain...
When Neutra first met Wright in 1924, shortly after Neutra had come to the U.S. to work, "it was just like suddenly seeing the unicorn or some other fairy tale figure one has been searching for behind the rainbow," as Neutra recalled later. The unicorn offered Neutra a job at his Taliesin, Wis. workstead. The association did much to shape Neutra's style, although, as Drexler says in the exhibition catalogue, Neutra was both praised and blamed for cleaning up Wright's complications. While Mies and the others translated Wrightian picturesque into the language of abstract painting, Neutra...