The Grisly Animated Film Ending That Lingers Audiences
Among every mature animated films I’ve personally viewed, nothing has lingered in my mind quite like the dread-soaked finale of a viscerally violent as well as overwhelingly transgressive film from 2022 Unicorn Wars.
Back in 2015’s, the Spain-based writer-director crafted a grim, melancholy and often savage world with a few small , forlorn glimmers of hope.
While The Unicorn Wars appears as it originated from an impulse to expand the medium further, the director clarified that it was actually an attempt to convey a widespread, cross-cultural theme about “the common origin of all wars.”
That idea is expressed through a band of brightly hued teddy bears , openly modeled after a well-known series of cuddly figures.
Maturing in a culture centered on warmongering and the war machine, many of these animals are obsessed with slaughtering unicorns, because of a sacred text that claims the bears they used to be rulers of the woods, until these creatures drove them out.
Others haven’t fully accepted the propaganda, and choose to experiment with drugs and engage sexually outdoors.
Unlike their friendly equivalents, these vivid animals display sexual organs , obvious urges.
For one notably brutal, skeptical animal, the bear named Bluey, the conflict against unicorns transforms into a path toward dominance — and specifically to authority above his gentler, nicer brother the bear Tubby.
The character acts as a tormentor and an apparent sociopath , and when terror overcomes his group and claims his comrades sequentially, he seizes increasingly power for himself, via progressively violent, harmful methods.
Simultaneously, these mythical beings are experiencing their own terror, through an expanding, harmful creature in their habitat.
“Initially, it feels like a lighthearted film,” the director said. “However it evolves into a more dramatic and melancholic film. And by the end, it becomes a horror film.”
Unicorn Wars begins feeling a bit like one of the more whimsical films by an iconic animator, which find a naughty glee in allowing drawn beings curse, shoot each other, or engage sexually.
Then it becomes closer to a bleaker work from the same artist, including ever more explicit brutality , a noticeable link to the real tragedy of war.
By the end, it is an outright theatrical horror carnage.
The terror which makes the film an ideal spooky-season movie kicks in well before than indicated.
The Unicorn Wars is one for the devoted gorehounds, for fans of intense movies who desire to see something they haven’t ever seen on-screen before, and can endure a narrative that offers unflinching brutality.
View it in a dark room without any distractions, and the finale will crawl under your skin and linger.
Where to watch: Offered for streaming or buying on multiple online services.
