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 services like Amazon Prime Video), which is your average incredibly violent animated film about cutesy-poo religious-zealot teddy bears bent on slaughtering all the unicorns in the land and therefore bringing about a prophesied utopia. I can read your thoughts now: “Again? Didn’t 80 for Brady JUST cover that exact same material?” Maybe – I’m pretty sure Lily Tomlin and her pals also chanted the slogan “HONOR, PAIN AND CUDDLES!” just like the warmongering teddies in director Alberto Vazquez’s follow-up to his Goya-winning debut Birdboy: The Forgotten Children. Of course, there’s always hope his film offers a fresh angle on the same ol’ same ol’, right? 

UNICORN WARS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: A sleepy, peaceful forest. Birds twitter. Bunnies hop. Unicorns saunter. One of those unicorns is named Maria, and she seeks out her mother but instead finds a horrible existential sludge monster devouring whatever is in its path. ELSEWHERE: “Love Camp,” reads a sign. It’s where teddy bears bust their asses in basic military training. A drill sergeant named Ironstroke (Manu Heras) barks orders. We meet some of the teddy bears – they have names like Coco, Pandi, Pompom and Snuggle. All the bears are incredibly vain and vaguely gay. They hug and kiss each other and practice shooting arrows whose deadly piercing arrowheads are shaped like little red hearts. They attend church services led by the Father (Txema Regalado), who reads from a bible-tome dictating a genocidal war against the unicorns, and stating that the bear who drinks the blood of the last unicorn will become “handsome” and immortal. “Good unicorn, dead unicorn,” everyone chants in church. “Good unicorn, dead unicorn.”

Our primaries here are bear brothers Tubby (Jaione Insausti), who’s pink and overweight, and Bluey (Jon Goirizelaia), who’s blue and sociopathic. Tubby seems to be the only one who has any shame about his physical appearance. He also wets the bed he shares with his brother, who suggests he sneak the dirty sheets into the laundry, then humiliates him in front of all the others mid-sneak. The bears wile away the days preparing for battle – they have bows and arrows and hand grenades, but no guns. They yearn to eat delicious blueberries but have to make do with pukey porridge. The military brass considers this squad’s ineptitude, then shrugs; they’re completely expendable. We get flashbacks to Tubby and Bluey’s childhood, which was sad and traumatic and surely shaped them into the empathetic gent and maniacal lunatic they are now.

Then, finally, a mission. Ironstroke will lead Tubby and Bluey and the rest of the battalion into the woods to find their lost comrades. Like most things in this storybook reality, the woods looks like an explosion of Babies R Us pastels – an explosion of Babies R Us pastels full of unseen horrors. Case in point, the frolicking unicorns, who seem like perfectly reasonable woodland creatures and not nearly as ideologically repulsive as the bears, so maybe the unicorns aren’t quite so horrible? There are rainbow-striped caterpillars that inspire nightmarish hallucinations when the gloop is sucked out of them, and a sequence during which the smell of burning fluff surely will never escape their adorable little button noses. This is all f—ed up stuff, but we haven’t even gotten to the incredibly disturbing graphic violence yet, with all the gutted unicorns and impaled teddy bears. Adorbs!

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

Performance Worth Watching: The artists and designers under Vazquez’s direction certainly have a distinct vision – every shot is well-considered and artful to the eye. 

Memorable Dialogue: Ironstroke argues with the Father about allowing the soldiers to let loose a little bit and get high on caterpillar gloop: “These soldiers are f—ed up! Look at them! God can back off tonight!”

Sex and Skin: Full-frontal teddy bear dong and berries. 

Our Take: OK, so the cute/grotesque juxtaposition is the key aesthetic in Unicorn Wars, and Vazquez finds some compelling dichotomies here: Effeminate male bears marching into the vile masculinity of war; the less-cute bear, Tubby, sports an empathetic streak his more attractive peers lack; although the unicorns are almost certainly the moral superiors here, we spend significantly more time with the bears and their galaxy-brained melange of blind dogma and superstitious drivel. Add in the widdle wuzzle-nuzzles committing unspeakable atrocities, and what you’ve got is… depressing. Just depressing.

But it’s also admirably creative and subversive, Vazquez crafting arcs for Bluey and Tubby with such bleak comedy, we don’t know whether to laugh or recoil. The film has drugs and gore and cruelty and deranged characters, and delights in sullying the cuteness with horror, as if reveling in the old Fight Club urge to “destroy something beautiful.” We’ll certainly draw parallels between the bears’ destructive society and our own, but subtextually, it’s unfocused, emphasizing the shock of its aesthetic over any social or political statements about the domination of the environment, or the violent and self-destructive tendencies of beings who consider themselves superior to all others. (Vazquez’s introduction of the existential sludge monster and “simians” in the woods only muddies the potential allegory.) The bottom line is provocative, though: The teddy bears think, therefore they are, and they do what they do because their god told them to. So maybe they should think for themselves?

Our Call: Unicorn Wars is one hell of a provocative fable, a weirdly compelling, visually appealing bummer rife with restless artistry and surreal madness. You can’t help but admire it despite its flaws. STREAM IT, but it ain’t for everyone.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.