The Last Unicorn (animation)/YMMV
The film
- Animation Age Ghetto: The movie looks like an Animesque kids' cartoon; and the story can be mistaken for a standard fantasy story about quests and magic and unicorns. In truth, it's nothing of the sort. The book has won many awards and is considered by fans and other authors to be one of the best works of fantasy ever written and the film is a beautifully animated faithful adaptation of the story.
- BLAM: The bit with the tree falling in love with Schmendrick is a peculiar bit of broad comedy plopped down in the middle of a wistful and melancholy work. It's handled much more subtly in the book.
- Complete Monster: King Haggard only ever experienced true joy once in his life, when he saw a unicorn. He thought he would die when he saw one, and when he sees them again, he remembers that utter bliss. So he sent the Red Bull to bring him every unicorn in the world and trap them in the sea below his castle, so that he and he alone could delight in the possession of them.
- Cult Classic: One of the most beautiful and deep forgotten gems of animation.
- Crowning Music of Awesome: The movie has a soundtrack that is way too awesome than a movie about unicorns has any right to be.
- Ear Worm: Quite a few of the songs, annoyingly so.
- Getting Crap Past the Radar: There's a female tree with breasts that gives Schmendrick Marshmallow Hell.
- Also for a more scary example, the Harpy has more exposed and human like breats
- Painful Rhyme: "When the first breath of winter through the flowers is icing / And you look to the north, and a pale moon is rising"
The book
- Tough Act to Follow: In a 1978 preface, Peter S. Beagle remarked that The Last Unicorn would "haunt the rest of (his) career," and that he grew "increasingly shy of talking about (it)." In this case, it seems that it wasn't the writing that Beagle grew tired of--it was the book. At San Diego Comic Con 2006, his remarks on Unicorn indicated he's not tired of the book so much as writing it was in some ways extremely difficult and painful... in contrast with other stories, which seemed to flow from him freely. He stated he had to fight to get the story written. Not something he enjoys thinking about.