Hacker Cinema
The Last Unicorn
1982 · Film · 93 min
Directed by Arthur Rankin Jr., Jules Bass
FantasyAnimationFamilyAdventure
A unicorn learns from a riddle-speaking butterfly that she is supposedly the last of her kind, all the others having been herded away by the monstrous Red Bull. The unicorn sets out to discover the truth behind the butterfly's words. She is eventually joined on her quest by Schmendrick, a second-rate magician, and Molly Grue, a middle-aged woman who dreamed all her life of seeing a unicorn. Their journey leads them far from home, all the way to the castle of King Haggard.
3 positive2 neutralfrom 5 commenters
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5 comments on Hacker News
> there’s a distinction between the work (the book The Last Unicorn), the expression (a given edition of the book), a manifestation (a given physical format for an expression, such as paperback or hardcover), and an item (an individual object in a collection)
The author misunderstands 'work', as far as I know: A work is "intellectual or artistic content of a distinct creation. It refers to a very abstract idea of a creation e.g. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and not a specific expression."[0]
In contrast, and "expression" is an "intellectual or artistic realization of a work. The realization may take the form of text, sound, image, object, movement, etc., or any combination of such forms."[0]
The Last Unicorn story is the work, 'the book The Last Unicorn" is an expression as would be the film version or the computer game, etc.
[0] https://www.ifla.org/references/best-practice-for-national-bibliographic-agencies-in-a-digital-age/resource-description-and-standards/bibliographic-control/functional-requirements-the-frbr-family-of-models/functional-requirements-for-bibliographic-records-frbr/ (as of a few years ago)
It's got some incredible animation. The story and studio infighting was what hurt the film, but it's still worth a watch if you haven't seen it. It really should have been a better movie. Targeting older audiences was a good idea and fantasy was a big genre. On the animation side The Last Unicorn was a recent success that was also darker fantasy than what disney was offering (fire and ice too, although that didn't get as wide an audience) and in live action Legend released that same year and Willow came after and both attracted a lot of fans. I really wonder what that movie might have been if Disney had been fully committed to the idea.
Loved that movie as a kid and just played it for my gf who hadn't seen it (but grew up watching The Last Unicorn).
Definitely simplistic compared to some more modern material, but I think it still holds up as something for younger kids who might not get more complex storylines. It's a cool modern fairy tale even if a few of the characterizations might be a bit iffy to modern sensibilities.
I think I get what the OP meant, or at least I have my interpretation of it.
I used to be fairly blasé about pirating software, justifying it with the belief that the prices were just too high. I came to believe that was really a pretty weak justification. I went through a somewhat similar change of belief later when it came to video; it's easy to talk yourself into the belief that copying TV shows and movies for free is somehow a strike against big corporations, but unless you're up for entirely reinventing the way our economy works, at the end of the day somebody really does have to pay for those shows and movies to be created, and pirating them is essentially declaring "I want to enjoy this work, I just want somebody else to pay for me doing so."
But:
There are cases where you might want to give your money to a creator or publisher and you literally can't. Up until a few years ago, no amount of money would have been able to get you the whole series of WKRP in Cincinnati on DVD, especially with the original music, for instance. The soundtrack for The Last Unicorn was never released on CD anywhere but Germany, as far as I can tell, and it's become a rare, expensive collector's item. There are hundreds of TV shows like this, thousands of movies, thousands of records, thousands of novels, thousands of programs -- and I'm probably vastly underestimating each of those categories. Their analog releases, if they were ever made, are long out of print and they were never officially released digitally.
And, I'll admit, in those cases I'm perfectly okay with piracy. The rights holder either can't or won't release it, and you can't get it legally. One can argue in such a case you'd have a moral obligation to buy an official release if and when it's made, perhaps, but that may never happen.
If what
Buy the bundle if you can possibly afford it. Not only are you getting six ebooks for a great price (that you set!!!!), but you're also striking a blow against DRM by proving that people pay for quality digital content.
Also, if you've never read The Last Unicorn, it's actually really funny and self-aware. You may have seen the animated movie some years ago, but IMHO, it's even better as a book!