Today's animated films are increasingly creatures of computer animated graphics, three dimensional to a fault, shiny and crowded with textures and vivid vistas. While no one will deny that Pixar's animated films are beautiful and inspiring, but there's a certain longing for classical hand drawn animation, for stories that are charmingly two dimensional and harken back to the classic animated children's movies we grew up with and loved.

For many of us, "The Last Unicorn" is one of those movies. "The Last Unicorn" tells the story of the unicorn who believes herself to tbe last unicorn (voiced by Mia Farrow). Determined not to remain the last of the unicorns, she goes off on a quest to seek to find the remainder of her kind who have been banished by The Red Bull.

In classic fantasy style, along the way she faces adventures and dangers and gains new traveling companions. Captured by the powerful witch Mommy Fortuna (voiced by Angela Lansbury), she escapes with the help of Schmendrick (voiced by Alan Arkin), whose magic usually goes disastrously wrong.

When the unicorn faces down The Red Bull, Schmendrick accidentally transforms her into a woman. As a woman, she and Schmendrick and Molly Grue (voiced by Tammy Grimes), who joined them along the way to search for Captain Cully, enter the castle of King Haggard (voiced by Christopher Lee).

Inside the castle, Schmendrick attempts to pass off the unicorn, now in human form, as the Lady Amalthea. There Amalthea (still voiced by Mia Farrow) encounters Prince Lir (voiced by Jeff Bridges) and begins to fall in love with him. The unicorn must struggle between her growing love for Prince Lir and her quest to discover the last of her kind, choosing between being an ordinary woman in love or a magical unicorn.

Along with Prince Lir, the entire party locates the lair of The Red Bull beneath the castle, just as her form is restored back to her former unicorn self. Prince Lir attempts to protect her and is killed for it by The Red Bull. Filled with grief, the unicorn turns on The Red Bull and drives him into the water. With The Red Bull banished, the remaining unicorns return and destroy the wicked King Haggard's castle.

The unicorn revives Prince Lir and departs with the rest of her kind. Apart now, Prince Lir and the unicorn feel pain at the loss of their love, but also joy at having known it at all.

While modern viewers may find the art and story simplistic, they are actually lavish and beautiful. The video clip of "The Last Unicorn" opening on the right gives the viewer an idea of what to expect. Classic two dimensional animation is in many ways capable of a far greater range of tone and image because it is framed rather than textured.

The themes also reasonate with classic fantasy tropes, with the bittersweet knowledge that the achievement of magic is tied to the loss of the ephemeral things that make mortal life worthwhile. While magic can offer higher beauty, it bars the way to love. It can transcend the ordinary, but in doing so it also leaves the ordinary behind.

The beauty of the unicorn and the immortal magical creatures she encounters precludes their interaction with humanity and humanity's interaction with magical creatures is often motivated by spite at their own mortality versus the transcendant immortality of the magical creatures. Mommy Fortuna and King Haggard are both driven by similar motivations. Their resentment of magic is ultimately frustrated, but in doing so they demonstrate the spiteful power of being able to injure magical creatures, even if they cannot possess their immortality for themselves.

The final seperation between Prince Lir, who is all too mortal, and the immortal unicorn, defines the gap between mortality and immortality, between the ordinary and the magical. Yet in the process, Prince Lir has gifted the unicorn, with something this magical creature never had before, the magic of love.

Based on a Peter S. Beagle novel and with a screenplay written by Beagle himself, "The Last Unicorn" is a charming journey into a land where fantasy is reality and reality is fantasy. Beagle's script is not the work of an amateur screenplay writer unwilling to release control of his creative property. Peter S. Beagle was also responsible for the screenplay for the animated "Lord of the Rings."

While admittedly the Ralph Bakshi production has a negative reputation, particularly in the aftermath of the success of Peter Jackson's live action adaptation, it was the animated movie that first inspired Peter Jackson. Not only does "The Last Unicorn" share its screenwriter with the Rankin-Bass animated productions of "The Hobbit" and "Return of the King," but the same animation studio, Topcraft, which would later go on to do Miyazaki's "Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind" and then play a major role in Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli.

These projects represent a kind of crossover between Japanese and American animation and in a limited way a passing of the torch from the animation of one culture to the next.