Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Unicorn Wars’ on VOD, a Deranged Animation About The World’s Most Violent Teddy Bears

This week on WTF Theater is Unicorn Wars (now streaming on VOD providers like Amazon Prime Video), which is your common extremely violent animated movie about cutesy-poo religious-zealot teddy bears bent on slaughtering all of the unicorns within the land and due to this fact bringing a couple of prophesied utopia. I can learn your ideas now: “Once more? Didn’t 80 for Brady JUST cowl that very same materials?” Possibly – I’m fairly certain Lily Tomlin and her buddies additionally chanted the slogan “HONOR, PAIN AND CUDDLES!” similar to the warmongering teddies in director Alberto Vazquez’s follow-up to his Goya-winning debut Birdboy: The Forgotten Youngsters. In fact, there’s at all times hope his movie gives a contemporary angle on the identical ol’ identical ol’, proper? 

The Gist: A sleepy, peaceable forest. Birds twitter. Bunnies hop. Unicorns saunter. A kind of unicorns is called Maria, and he or she seeks out her mom however as a substitute finds a horrible existential sludge monster devouring no matter is in its path. ELSEWHERE: “Love Camp,” reads an indication. It’s the place teddy bears bust their asses in fundamental navy coaching. A drill sergeant named Ironstroke (Manu Heras) barks orders. We meet a number of the teddy bears – they’ve names like Coco, Pandi, Pompom and Snuggle. All of the bears are extremely useless and vaguely homosexual. They hug and kiss one another and apply capturing arrows whose lethal piercing arrowheads are formed like little crimson hearts. They attend church providers led by the Father (Txema Regalado), who reads from a bible-tome dictating a genocidal battle towards the unicorns, and stating that the bear who drinks the blood of the final unicorn will turn out to be “good-looking” and immortal. “Good unicorn, useless unicorn,” everybody chants in church. “Good unicorn, useless unicorn.”

Our primaries listed below are bear brothers Tubby (Jaione Insausti), who’s pink and chubby, and Bluey (Jon Goirizelaia), who’s blue and sociopathic. Tubby appears to be the one one who has any disgrace about his bodily look. He additionally wets the mattress he shares together with his brother, who suggests he sneak the soiled sheets into the laundry, then humiliates him in entrance of all of the others mid-sneak. The bears wile away the times getting ready for battle – they’ve bows and arrows and hand grenades, however no weapons. They yearn to eat scrumptious blueberries however must make do with pukey porridge. The navy brass considers this squad’s ineptitude, then shrugs; they’re utterly expendable. We get flashbacks to Tubby and Bluey’s childhood, which was unhappy and traumatic and absolutely formed them into the empathetic gent and maniacal lunatic they’re now.

Then, lastly, a mission. Ironstroke will lead Tubby and Bluey and the remainder of the battalion into the woods to seek out their misplaced comrades. Like most issues on this storybook actuality, the woods appears like an explosion of Infants R Us pastels – an explosion of Infants R Us pastels stuffed with unseen horrors. Living proof, the frolicking unicorns, who look like completely cheap woodland creatures and never almost as ideologically repulsive because the bears, so possibly the unicorns aren’t fairly so horrible? There are rainbow-striped caterpillars that encourage nightmarish hallucinations when the gloop is sucked out of them, and a sequence throughout which the scent of burning fluff absolutely won’t ever escape their cute little button noses. That is all f—ed up stuff, however we haven’t even gotten to the extremely disturbing graphic violence but, with all of the gutted unicorns and impaled teddy bears. Adorbs!

What Motion pictures Will It Remind You Of?: Unicorn Wars is like Full Metallic Jacket meets Apocalypse Now however with Care Bears, with the aesthetics of Heavy Metallic and the bleeding cute animals of Watership Down.

Efficiency Price Watching: The artists and designers below Vazquez’s path actually have a definite imaginative and prescient – each shot is well-considered and clever to the attention. 

Memorable Dialogue: Ironstroke argues with the Father about permitting the troopers to let free a bit of bit and get excessive on caterpillar gloop: “These troopers are f—ed up! Have a look at them! God can again off tonight!”

Intercourse and Pores and skin: Full-frontal teddy bear dong and berries. 

Our Take: OK, so the lovable/grotesque juxtaposition is the important thing aesthetic in Unicorn Wars, and Vazquez finds some compelling dichotomies right here: Effeminate male bears marching into the vile masculinity of battle; the less-cute bear, Tubby, sports activities an empathetic streak his extra engaging friends lack; though the unicorns are virtually actually the ethical superiors right here, we spend considerably extra time with the bears and their galaxy-brained melange of blind dogma and superstitious drivel. Add within the widdle wuzzle-nuzzles committing unspeakable atrocities, and what you’ve received is… miserable. Simply miserable.

But it surely’s additionally admirably artistic and subversive, Vazquez crafting arcs for Bluey and Tubby with such bleak comedy, we don’t know whether or not to snigger or recoil. The movie has medication and gore and cruelty and deranged characters, and delights in sullying the cuteness with horror, as if reveling within the outdated Battle Membership urge to “destroy one thing stunning.” We’ll actually draw parallels between the bears’ harmful society and our personal, however subtextually, it’s unfocused, emphasizing the shock of its aesthetic over any social or political statements concerning the domination of the surroundings, or the violent and self-destructive tendencies of beings who contemplate themselves superior to all others. (Vazquez’s introduction of the existential sludge monster and “simians” within the woods solely muddies the potential allegory.) The underside line is provocative, although: The teddy bears suppose, due to this fact they’re, and so they do what they do as a result of their god informed them to. So possibly they need to suppose for themselves?

Our Name: Unicorn Wars is one hell of a provocative fable, a weirdly compelling, visually interesting bummer rife with stressed artistry and surreal insanity. You possibly can’t assist however admire it regardless of its flaws. STREAM IT, but it surely ain’t for everybody.

John Serba is a contract author and movie critic primarily based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.