InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 10

FILM REVIEWS
of this narrative shares plenty of DNA with that of Cain and Abel,
though there are also specific details about Bluey and Tubby’s
childhood and the traumas and resentments that have festered
in the formative years since their youth. Bluey is ruthless,
ambitious, and cruel, thirsty for slaughter and merciless in
tongue and action; Tubby is gentle and kind, prone to stress
eating and insecurity, and coded as effete. It follows, then, that
they will ultimately manifest the film’s central construction of
good vs. evil, to be layered with and played out against the
ongoing war’s essential binary.
If that all sounds determinedly allegorical, however, that wouldn’t
be exactly accurate. Vázquez cribs as liberally from the tradition
of fable as he does from recent history’s tradition of
ultra-nationalist military fascism and cinema’s representation of
war’s atrocities. After a quick foreshadowing sequence featuring
a young unicorn coming face-to-face with an undulating,
amorphous blob trying to snack down on the innocent, Unicorn
Wars opens proper with a series of scenes of the DayGlo-colored,
claw machine-looking teddy bears engaged in boot camp-styled
grunt training and barracks-set character mapping, uncannily
recalling the likes of Full Metal Jacket and Platoon (“Honour, pain,
and cuddles” is their motto). We see how these soldiers are
conditioned with hatred for the other; we see the fascist regime’s
higher-ups safe in their offices, emotionlessly discussing the
necessity of collateral damage and planning the impending
suicide mission assigned to Bluey and Tubby’s troop; we hear the
rhetoric that suggests a Holy War of sorts, reasserting the film’s
religious infrastructure, yes, but also — in its modern combat-era
images — drawing in the post-Renaissance’s prevailing religion:
imperialism.
But explicit metaphor isn’t Vázquez’s game; he’s far more
interested in ladling references and evocative imagery on top of
his distinctive visual design, which offers the foundation
necessary for any of his tonal maneuvers and
thematic/intellectual invocations to succeed. Unicorn Wars’
visual character establishes the film firmly in horror territory
(seeing as Judeo-Christian religious imagery is a core foundation
of a good deal of horror anyway, it already had a headstart); in
contrast, itsteddy bear characters not only insinuate childhood in
language and depiction, but act in overtly infantile ways: they cry
over minor emotional slights and physical wounds, bed-wetting is
used as a repeated insult, characters accuse others of trying to
peek at their “willy.” Children are being sent to wage war, in other
words, but Vázquez envelops that violence and its retributions in
a tonally discordant technicolor. The animation here is a
vibrantly colored and effectively disorienting and haunting blend
of 2D and 3D (as well as some 3D that was converted to 2D), with
scenes of bloody
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