That Gory Animated Film Ending That Stays With Audiences
Out of every adult-oriented cartoon movies I have ever viewed, nothing has remained with me quite like the fear-filled conclusion of the viscerally violent and overwhelingly transgressive 2022 movie The Unicorn Wars.
Back in the year 2015, the Spanish writer-director developed a grim, somber , frequently brutal universe that included a few small , forlorn glimmers of hope.
While The Unicorn Wars feels like it came from an impulse to expand the medium further, the filmmaker stated that it was more an attempt to express a global, cross-cultural message concerning “the mutual source of each battle.”
This theme is expressed through a band of colorful pastel bears , openly inspired by a famous line of lovable figures.
Being raised in a community centered on warmongering as well as the defense industry, many of these animals are obsessed with killing unicorns, because of a religious scripture that tells the bears they were once kings of the forest, before these creatures expelled them.
Others did not entirely bought into the brainwashing, and choose to sample substances or mate outdoors.
In contrast to their gentle equivalents, these bright beings display genitals and clear sex drives.
For a certain particularly cruel, cynical bear, Bluey, the conflict against the unicorns becomes a path to control — and specifically to authority above his more tender, more compassionate sibling Tubby.
Bluey behaves aggressively and an obvious psychopath , and as horror overcomes his unit and claims his fellow soldiers sequentially, he seizes more and more power for himself, in increasingly violent, destructive ways.
At the same time, the unicorns are suffering their own nightmare, through a spreading, deadly beast in their forest.
“At the beginning, it feels like a lighthearted film,” the director commented. “But then it becomes a more serious and sorrowful movie. And by the end, it’s a horror film.”
The Unicorn Wars begins similar to one of the most quirky movies from an iconic filmmaker, that uncover a wicked pleasure in permitting drawn beings curse, engage in violence, or sex each other up.
Afterward it evolves into something more like a bleaker movie from that director, with increasingly explicit brutality and a palpable link to the real horror of war.
By the end, it is an outright extreme drama bloodbath.
The terror that makes the film a Halloween-friendly movie begins much sooner than indicated.
The Unicorn Wars is one for the hardcore gorehounds, for lovers of graphic films who desire to watch a film they’ve never viewed until now, and who can handle a plot that offers unflinching brutality.
Watch it in a dark room free from interruptions, and that ending will crawl into your mind and linger.
How to view: Offered for digital rental or sale on various streaming sites.
