The Last at Last

Yesterday I showed The Last Unicorn to the English club at the junior high school I'm working at. That's harder than it sounds. You see, I'm in Japan, and The Last Unicorn has never been released here, despite the fact that the animation on the Rankin Bass movie was done by a Japanese studio called Topcraft, a studio which later combined with others to become none other than Studio Ghibli. It was puzzling that it had never been released here. So back in July, I decided my big project for August would be to make Japanese subtitles for the film.

It was a lot more time consuming than I thought it would be, even though, for the most part, I wasn't doing the actual translating. Although the movie had never been released in Japan, Peter S. Beagle's original 1968 novel had, and had been translated. Most of the dialogue in the book happens to be the same in the movie so this meant I could get a translation in much better Japanese than I'm capable of. The main trouble was that it used a lot of kanji I'm unfamiliar with--the Japanese writing system uses three sets of characters; katakana and hiragana are simple pronunciation based characters similar to the English alphabet but kanji consists of thousands of Chinese characters, each with multiple pronunciations and pictographic elements. Only a fraction of them are in common use but this changes from decade to decade meaning that there are characters in books from, say, 70 years ago that average young Japanese people would struggle to read to-day. This is one of the ways Japan keeps itself insulated from common citizens developing critical thinking skills.

So it was very slow going because the characters were too small to simply scan with my phone. I had to look up unfamiliar kanji on Wiktionary by the radicals. For example, the little character on the left side of 信, "believe", is actually a small version of 人, "person". Wiktionary has helpful pages of these "radicals" I could go through to eventually find the kanji I was looking for.

Of course, the songs aren't in the book. I found translations for two of them; the main theme has been covered a few times so I found a translation for it on a blog from about fifteen years ago when some young Scottish singer with some level of fame in Japan covered it. "That's All I've Got to Say" was covered on an episode of The Orville so I was able to get that translation from Disney+. The other songs I had to translate myself. The students said my translations weren't perfect but they got the gist.

So yesterday may in fact be the first time the movie was screened for a Japanese audience since it was first released in 1982. The students seemed to enjoy it though, actually showing it to them, I was reminded what a lousy time the early '80s was for animation. How could I make excuses for the fact that every character was painted exactly the same regardless of the lighting? Or the strange jerky movements of occasionally, improperly aligned animation cells? I couldn't say it was because it was an old movie when older movies like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty stand up against anything to-day. It truly was a Dark Age. At least The Last Unicorn has an excellent story, a superb voice cast, and decent songs.