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Impermanence in Happily Ever After

In the 1982 animated fairytale The Last Unicorn, the characters employ various scapegoat mechanisms to deal with their own mortality, grappling with negative feelings of fear, regret, and loneliness. The movie begins in a forest in a perpetual state of spring, which is attributed to the presence of the last unicorn. After the unicorn realizes she is the last unicorn, she embarks on a journey to King Haggard and the Red Bull to find the others. She is quickly captured by Mommy Fortuna, a loathsome witch with the compulsive need to memorialize herself through her captures, finding power not through magic, but through living forever in memories. The unicorn also meets a naive and inexperienced wizard named Schmendrick and a disillusioned cook named Molly Grue, who join her on her journey. In order to save the unicorn from the Red Bull, Schmendrick turns her into a human being. The unicorn, filled with despair and anguish, proclaims, “I wish you had let the Red Bull take me. I wish you had left me to the Harpy! I can feel this body dying all around me!” (0:48:53 - 0:49:03). How does this movie stray from typical fairy tale tropes, and what does this say about how humans idealize the concept of happily ever after?

The antagonists of the story, Mommy Fortuna and King Haggard, defy the typical caricature of evil. Mommy Fortuna walks with a hunched back, wears ragged clothes, and has large blemishes and wrinkles on her face. A spindly branch is attached to her head, where a crow lives on top, serving as a physical representation for the character’s wickedness. She runs a shabby zoo, casting measly illusions and deceptions onto animals to entertain the guests. Mommy Fortuna does not hold the conventional antagonist feelings of vanity and pride, for she is fully aware that caging the Harpy will lead to her eventual demise. She instead clings to the idea that she will be immortalized through the creature’s memories, her legacy engraved in the mental scars of those she captures and cages. King Haggard is a sad, lonely man, attempting to find a permanency in happiness through his waning love for his son, cheap magic tricks, and a sea full of shining unicorns. He is an old, withered man with wrinkly skin, discolored features, and a pointy nose. The jovial gatherings and lively feasts typically associated with castles and royalty simply do not exist for King Haggard. So, he yearns for a tangible, immortal happiness, believing that through capturing all the unicorns, he can reach this permanency. Both villains feel this desire to memorialize themselves, their feelings, and their legacies in the constant face of death, unwilling to ever concede that this permanency simply doesn’t exist. When the unicorn turns into a human being, she assumes the identity of Lady Amalthea. She has porcelain skin, blonde hair, and wide eyes. She is a complex hero, both conforming to and defying traditional female protagonist characterizations: She is beautiful and helps others, but she was always immortal and cannot fathom human mortality. Lady Amalthea slowly begins to forget and lose parts of her old self, representing the loss of her innocence that is inextricably linked with being human. As King Haggard remarks, her eyes became as empty as Prince Lir’s. At the end of the movie, Lady Amalthea turns back into a unicorn, where she fights back against the Red Bull. She is different from the other unicorns that were driven into the sea, for she has lost her purity, her innocence, and her immortal bubble of ignorance. In the end, she remains a unicorn, although a part of her will continue to grapple with mortality, love, and regret.

The unsatisfactory ending to the story is best encapsulated by Schmendrick’s remark that “There are no happy endings, because nothing ends” (1:22:40 - 1:22:44). The traditional fairy tale feelings often lauded and memorialized as infinite - such as residing in a perpetual state of happiness or love - are instead portrayed as something rare and finite. There is no definitive hero’s journey and no set of steps that will bring about permanency, for everything seems to dissipate with time. Overall, The Last Unicorn forces us to confront our uncomfortability with our own mortality. We search for ways to immortalize our legacies or ourselves, but we will always face the finite constraints and limitations of time. We must therefore make the most out of moments of love and happiness, not to control them, but to learn to truly appreciate them in their finite beauty and joy.