Who knew an animated movie made up of sunshine, rainbows, cuddles, and teddy bear dicks could be as bleak as Unicorn Wars? Maybe that last list item is a warning sign. For a bigger indicator, look at the director: Alberto Vázquez, the mind behind 2015’s Birdboy: The Forgotten Children. Together, these films make a fine double feature of grotesqueries, though compared to Unicorn Wars, Birdboy is an episode of Sesame Street. A story about drug addiction, corrupt authorities, and environmental collapse sounds grim on paper and plays grim on screen, but Unicorn Wars is more than “grim.” It’s deranged.
Scorched earth and religious prejudice tie these two movies together. In Unicorn Wars, the former comes well after the latter, a deep-rooted belief in God being one impelling factor of many driving conflict between warring factions: Peaceful, forest-dwelling unicorns, and warmongering teddy bears. This isn’t a metaphor. There are literal teddy bears. The bears are governed by fascist tough-bears who derive their status from perpetuating war. The war is pointless, but the ruling class keep training squads of bears with names like “Cuddly Wuddly” and “Pompom,” and sending them into the Magic Forest, where the unicorns massacre them. Or maybe it isn’t unicorns doing the killing. Who cares? Not the fascists! They’ll happily let teddy blood spill as long as they keep their paws on the levers of power.
Vázquez settles on two characters as the film trudges into the heart of darkness: Brothers Bluey/Azulín (Jon Goiri) and Tubby/Gordi (Jaione Insausti). Bluey is a macho jingoist, while Tubby is, well, the fat one. He’s also sensitive and kind, and routinely made the butt of countless cruel remarks about his girth as well as his bedwetting habits. Like the question of who’s actually killing the teddy bears in the Magic Forest, there’s a mystery hanging over whether Tubby’s responsible for his own soiled sheets or not; while the answer is technically neither here nor there, Unicorn Wars is so laser-focused on the notion of deception as a means to maintaining one’s position in a hierarchy that even the simple matter of soiled linens feels relevant.
That doesn’t mean the movie is too serious to enjoy its toilet humor. But Unicorn Wars carefully packs big, meaningful themes into a candy-coated parcel, using delirium as bubble wrap to keep its contents secure. It’s easy to chuckle at the collision between presentation and referentialism; Drill Sergeant Ironstroke (Txema Regalado) makes a superb stand-in for Gunnery Sergeant Hartman from Full Metal Jacket, brutalizing his teddy bears’ spirits as they fumble at target practice (with bows and heart-tipped arrows, of course), at assault courses, and even at basic bedtime discipline. The contrast between style and substance prompts guffaws.
But laughter isn’t just a logical response to Vázquez’s storytelling. It’s a survival tactic. Yes, there’s innate comedy in watching stuffed animals (animals stuffed with guts, that is) cheerfully wade into a confluence of Apocalypse Now, Legend and FernGully, easy pickings for nature’s various dangers, like flora and fauna that’s either poisonous or hallucinogenic, as well as unicorns, who’d be happier just doing their own thing if only those fundamentalist weirdo bears would leave them alone. But there’s abiding sadness in Unicorn Wars’ material, too. Maybe it boils down to cuteness. Watching avatars for your kid’s favorite lovey get fed into the Magic Forest like so much meat through a grinder is heartbreaking. More importantly, though, the film chronicles the moment in Earth’s history where wonder dies, which is more tragic than the demise of a couple hundred teddy bears.
Further description would sully Vázquez’s endgame. With Unicorn Wars, he builds toward a grand, misanthropic statement, not about bears or unicorns but the human race: who we are, how we came into being, and how we wound up in the shit place we’re in in 2023. The birth of man necessitated the sacrifice of beauty, so Vázquez makes his film as beautiful as possible to compensate. His electric, vibrant color palette is only part of the trip, and less important than his animation team’s scene transitions: Images bleed so seamlessly into one another that you may not even notice them changing until it’s already happened. A campfire begets an inferno; a war crime begets a childhood flashback.
The fluidity in their craftsmanship is equally as impressive as Vázquez’s talent for Trojan Horsing metaphors about the human condition into a movie about teddy bears knifing unicorns and unicorns goring teddy bears. If that was the whole picture, then Unicorn Wars would still be worth watching as an exercise in bad taste filmmaking and gonzo animation, like an extended episode of Happy Tree Friends constructed with actual skill. Ridiculous as it sounds, though, there’s more to Vázquez’s neon and gore-soaked vision than its grody particulars give away at first glance. Openly raunchy as his film may be, under that surface, it’s downright biblical.
Director: Alberto Vázquez
Writer: Alberto Vázquez
Starring: Jon Goiri, Jaione Insausti, Ramón Barea, Txema Regalado, Manu Heras
Release Date: March 10, 2023
Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers the movies, beer, music, and being a dad for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours. He has contributed to Paste since 2013. You can follow him on Twitter and find his collected work at his personal blog. He’s composed of roughly 65% craft beer.