Title: “The Unicorn in the Garden”
Year released: 1953
Character(s):
Story by: James Thurber
Animation by: Phil Monroe/Rudy Larriva/Tom McDonald
Directed by: William Hurtz
Studio: UPA (United Productions of America)
I remember James Thurber. I used to watch
My World… and Welcome to It, but I am not really familiar at all with his work. This cartoon is based on his 1939 short story, and is the first entry on the chart, so to speak, for UPA, who would go on to become famous as one of the “second-tier” American animation houses, whose main claim to fame is the short-sighted
Mr. Magoo. My first impressions are that the animation is very basic for the time. Given that we’re now twenty years almost past
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, to say nothing of Popeye and the rise of Warner Bros’
Looney Tunes, this is poor. The colour looks washed-out, like those three-step ones before Uncle Walt’s stranglehold on four-step loosened; it’s almost like a black-and-white cartoon with colour more or less randomly splashed about. The figures are drawn, I suppose, in Thurber’s style, and really are more line drawings than anything else. Kind of reminds me of those early German animations back before the war.
To be fair, the animation is smooth enough, even allowing the main character to balance precariously on one foot as he tries to shut the fridge door with the other, weighed down as he is with bottles and things. But the predominant colours used here are white, black, yellow and orange, and it makes it all look very sort of sepia-toned. The run up the flights of stairs is fluid, though in fairness it should be pointed out that this is done in almost darkness, so there’s no real need for much to be drawn in these frames but the man and the stairs, so that might account for the fluidity. At least they use cartoon physics, where, as the man enters his wife’s bedroom (presumably also his, but who knows) his arm elongates to open the shutters on the window, rather than he stand on tiptoes or on a chair. Having seen - and touched - the unicorn that is eating his roses in the garden, he then runs up the stairs to tell his wife, but she, sleepy and grumpy, tells him unicorns don’t exist, and goes back to sleep.
She’s made to look very shrewish from the start, even when we hear her sniping voice call down as he drops an egg in the kitchen, and then when we see her, she has dark, slanted eyebrows which show in a frown, sharp eyes and a sharper nose. Doesn’t seem to be much love there. Back he goes anyway to feed the unicorn, delighted it’s still there. Now here they just reuse the entirety of the scene where he ran up the stairs - it’s not a new piece of animation, but the very same one used again. This time his wife threatens to put him in “the booby hatch”, which I assume is an asylum, and goes back to sleep again. When he’s gone back down though, she leaps out of bed and phones the police, saying they’ll need a strait-jacket, and seems very pleased indeed.
In the garden, the man finds the unicorn has vanished, though he can see the hoofprints leading into another garden, and sits down under a tree while his wife visits the psychiatrist (very cliched looking - bald head, long beard, Freudesque) and finds herself being the one taken away. Coming to the office, the man is asked by the shrink if he had said he had seen a unicorn, and, presumably seeing his chance to get rid of the wife, says “Of course not: a unicorn is a mythical beast!” And so she’s taken away, to the tunes of the “Wedding March”, no less. The moral at the end is shown as “Don’t count your boobies until they’re hatched.” Clever.
Comments: While it’s a cute story, I don’t find the animation great, but let’s see what eminent animation historians have to say about it. In the book. Okay so they tell me that the crude animation was done that way so as to be faithful to Thurber’s own illustrations, and that colour was used very sparingly as the man himself only ever drew line drawings in black. Fair enough. Also, up to this point audiences were used to anthros, and so having human characters (something UPA wanted to stick with, perhaps to distinguish themselves from the madcap antics of Bugs Bunny et al) was seen as “revolutionary” at the time. Well now: wasn’t Snow White human? And Sleeping Beauty? Maybe they mean on television.
My own personal rating: 6/10