The Last Unicorn

A bright and beautiful copy of the beloved fantasy novel, which has never been out of print. Beagle refused to allow the book to be animated by Walt Disney: "When the whole question of Disney animating The Last Unicorn came up, I turned it down flat. If I ever meet T.H. White in the afterlife, I never want to have to explain why I went to Disney after what he did to The Sword in the Stone."

The book was instead adapted by the New York-based production company Rankin/Bass, even though Beagle, in his own words, "hated everything Rankin and Bass had ever done." They allowed him to write the screenplay, and he found them surprisingly easy to work with. The animation was handled with great care in Japan by the studio Topcraft, and the voice actors included Jeff Bridges and Mia Farrow.

Beagle had braced himself for a bad film. When he saw the finished product, he was stunned. Like its fellow 1980s fantasy classic The Princess Bride, the movie was a box office failure but gained a cult following on VHS. Reviewers had disliked the non-Disney animation style, but Americans were gradually warming to a new aesthetic, one they would soon wholeheartedly embrace: when Topcraft dissolved in 1985, its principals reformed as Studio Ghibli.