London Film Festival
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.