I’m up in Maine visiting the niece and nephew this week, and for movie night tonight we watched The Last Unicorn.

The film has a very high reputation, but honestly, I wasn’t impressed by it. Oh, it’s interesting, and I think I’m glad I saw it, there are a lot of good ideas in it, but it’s very strange and not usually in a good way, with incidents that come and go with seemingly little purpose or connection, and the A-List vocal talent mostly sound very phoned in (Alan Arkin is particularly stiff).

Speaking of which, there are a lot of rambling 70s-style songs, most of which weren’t very good at all (the title track is worth another look). And my goodness, they should never have allowed Jeff Bridges and Mia Farrow to try to sing!

For instance, at one point the incompetent wizard is captured by bandits, but they seem a fairly jolly, harmless bunch, then he suddenly busts out with a spell that summons images of Robin Hood and his Merry Men, because I guess the bandits idolized them, which sends most of the gang running off into the woods, except the bandit leader, who ties him to a tree, which then…well, we’ll leave off what happens then. But the thing is, I wasn’t even clear whether the bandits were good guys or bad guys, or whether we were trying to get away from them or not when the wizard burst out with his spell; the whole incident takes about three minutes. On the other hand we have the anachronistic singing butterfly in the opening, who feels like an AI attempt at a Robin Williams character, in that he jumps between personas and fourth-wall breaking jokes in a rather manic fashion…except that it’s not funny, feels like he goes on forever, and he’s one of the first characters we encounter, the one who sets the plot in motion.

Of course, on the positive side you have Christopher Lee as the villain, giving his all as usual (apparently he loved the book and actually brought it with him to his recording session, complete with highlighted passages of dialogue that he thought should be added to the script) and standing out as one of the few voice actors who never made me wince with his delivery. Angela Lansbury was another one, and her character was at least interesting. Some of the animation is nice, though little of it really stood out to me, except the foam on the waves turning into unicorns.

Overall, this is one of those films where I feel like I might be missing something, since between it’s high reputation and the combination of promising concepts, I feel like I ought to like it, but I came away disappointed and faintly bewildered.

(And to be entirely fair, we had just gotten through the first twenty minutes or so of The Sound of Music, enough to remind me of how superlatively excellent that film is, so the juxtaposition didn’t do The Last Unicorn any favors).