A great, and rare, pleasure in a critic’s life comes when a film that had originally irritated you slowly but surely begins to claw back a bit of space in your opinion, carving out an area in which it can be seen by you with nearly objective eyes, and finally wins you over to its cause. Such was the experience for this reviewer of watching the animated film Unicorn Wars, whose teeth-grinding premise (a platoon of teddy bears goes to war against forest-dwelling unicorns) soon gives way to a pleasingly macabre register, and whose limber animation fleshes out what had appeared like try-hard edgelordism.
As the film begins, a ragtag squadron of teddy bears—including two mismatched brothers, Bluey (who is blue and angry) and Tubby (who is pink and kind)—are in training to do battle against the perceived mortal enemy of teddies, a herd of sleek black unicorns who dwell in the nearby forest. These opening scenes take a fair bit of getting used to, not least because they are quite character-focused, and the characters are… little teddy bears. The voice work (in the original Spanish) is childlike and heightened, and the aesthetic is simple and fairly unengaging, focusing on these characters with standard-issue rounded bodies and big eyes in their barracks.
There is also something a bit irritating here in the kind of puerile pleasure that Unicorn Wars seems to take in marrying cutesy animation with adult themes; the jokes are already a little threadbare at the start, with military leaders called things like “Sergeant Fluffy” eliciting a sigh rather than a guffaw. Likewise, the warring teddies, the legion of seething young creatures squabbling among themselves, are apparently offered up as a kind of glib adult subversion of childhood mythos, which jars. If the audience is supposed to buy the idea that these teddies are soldiers, it shouldn’t really make us laugh that they urinate.
And yet, as Unicorn Wars opens up its narrative, moving a little way past the various rivalries of this gang, it begins to deepen its mythology and darken its tone in ways that are convincing. An early grace note comes with a little précis of the history of war between bears and unicorns, rendered in mock-medieval animation inscribed within a document, as in early Disney. The influence of Disney is visible, too, in the beautiful and lively design of the forest: the hand of Eyvind Earle, the artist responsible for the tangled sylvan labyrinths of Sleeping Beauty, is evident in these scenes, where the sprawling woods—forbidding yet wondrous, glistening with dew, home to hosts of hopping and scurrying creatures—are a character of their own. Indeed, the initially repellent color palette of the film, all Microsoft violets and greens, starts to come into its own as the battalion advances into the heart of the woods.
Not long into this excursion, as the bears seek out their enemy and set up camp, guided by a crazed commander and a man (bear) of god, things begin to take a turn for the brutal—and here the film embarks on what will eventually become a truly Biblical body count, with a first round of bear deaths that at once set the tone for things to come, and also lull the audience into a false sense of security. The deaths signal that director Alberto Vasquez means business, but the manner of the deaths may induce viewers to think they’re here to enjoy a bit of ripe sport, a giddy laugh at the very concept of these characters dying (one bear gutted on the ground, another strung up high in a tree). In fact, Vasquez has a much bleaker project than this, and the movie’s truly gnarly reign of ultraviolence serves a pretty sophisticated discourse. But in the meantime, there’s a rather juicy drug-trip sequence in which the teddies ghoulishly feast on hallucinogenic fireflies in the forest at night, leading the film’s pictures into a concomitantly swooning and free-flowing evocation of that state of mind. The trip soon takes a turn for the worse, and the teddy bears, on the come-up next morning, find the mutilated bodies of their comrades: all of this is well-executed, and gives a flavor of what is still to come.
With the Abel-and-Cain figures of Tubby and Bluey, the film mines a great deal of familial pain: the love both have for their departed mother, and the seething hatred Bluey has for the feckless father figure, leading him to espouse a poisonous male mindset, put meat on the bones of this parable, as the two characters tussle and are finally set on opposing courses. In its consideration of these characters, whose relationship has a quasi-incestuous strain—in the view that it has of these childlike figures, whose animation stands in opposition to the natural world around them—the film recalls the work of Henry Darger, which imprints disturbing themes onto its adorable childlike figures. That opposition is necessary for the film’s emotional arc and for its narrative, as Bluey is possessed by hate and fully radicalized. (On that note, if you miss Unicorn Wars’ political dimension, in which the bears pathologize and hunt down the black unknown figures nearby, you are to be congratulated on your simplicity of mind, which doubtless comes in useful in 2022.)
Following a military attack that goes wrong (leading to a great many more deaths, shown in gruesome detail), Bluey is made a figurehead of the bear army for his heroism, while Tubby is led to befriend an orphaned unicorn, leading him to empathize with the enemy. The scene is set for a battle, pitting the two together.
It is in the film’s deepening interrogation of violence—in the way it dares to follow through on its project, which gradually becomes awash with blood and gore—that Unicorn Wars convinces. Here, the film uses animation adroitly: its color scheme and its scale shift appropriately; battlefields are strewn with bodies, bathed in rivers of blood. There is a laudable darkness in the film’s viewpoint, which gets astoundingly bitter in an inspired last-minute rug-pull worthy of Planet of the Apes, in which Vasquez links his mythology to a more universal strain of hatred and violence.
Unicorn Wars is likely to find a cult audience, perhaps drawn in by its superficially “out there” meshing of the childlike with adult themes, but the film has a fair bit more than that up its sleeve.
