Whatever movie you think you’re about to watch, if that movie is Unicorn Wars, hear this: you thought wrong. Seldom does so gonzo a proposition as this even make it past one’s own lips, never mind past a producer. Yet, in a development so bizarre it wouldn’t be at all out of place in this movie itself, Alberto Vázquez’s utterly nutty second feature – making his first, 2015’s Birdboy: The Forgotten Children, appear about as tame as a filler episode of Downton Abbey – has made it all the way onto the screen and into the great wide world.
It’s a greater, wider world for having it; Vázquez’s stretches of imagination seem to heave and distend at the edges of the very universe in their sheer wackiness. There’s hardly a moment in this movie that doesn’t introduce at least one or two new elements, each as loopy as the last. Any single sequence could be the oddest you’ll see all year – all decade? – but, cumulatively, these sequences form a tapestry of the wildest conceivable artistic abandon, every panel shedding the narrative fabric of those before it and replacing it with something startlingly unexpected. Out of context, it’s all pretty unhinged. In context, it’s borderline insane.
Where to start with a story like this? Even its bare bones are bizarre: a troupe of teddy bears venture into an enchanted forest to rescue a missing squadron of fellow teddies, unresponsive for several days, in their war with the unicorns who reside there. Legend has it that the teddies gained divine intelligence, thus enraging the unicorns and causing them to attack the teddies, who were then driven from the forest. Like much else in Unicorn Wars, this legend is shot onto the screen no sooner than it’s purged from it by some other oddity – the inference is that, given the unicorns’ apparent benevolence, this is all just fascist teddy bear propaganda, though confirmation of such would entail a level of explanation Vázquez is admirably, entirely loath to provide.
So, you’ll have to come up with your own explanations for a solid chunk of what Unicorn Wars shoots at you. Genre shifts carve through the movie like lightning splitting open a tree; if lightning never strikes twice, though, what about five or six times? Why, for example, does Vázquez decide to veer, screechingly, into new narrative and stylistic territory so often, indeed right up until the movie’s final moments? What was the motivation behind an infernal mashup of Full Metal Jacket, Princess Mononoke – liberally referenced throughout – and some demented Trey Parker / Matt Stone knock-off? Was that flashback actually a scene of matricide? Did another scene genuinely feature attempted incestuous sexual assault? And who on Earth ever thought any of this would make a good movie?!
The most inexplicable thing of all is that, against all odds (and then some), somehow it does. Save twin, often merging predilections for kooky perversion and graphic violence, there’s little ostensibly holding Unicorn Wars together as it sprints from scene to scene, idea to idea. So the ideas themselves are the fuel and, in Vázquez’s determined, incessant deployment of them, the single feature maintaining a sense of continuity. And his ideas are bold and brilliant, some more successfully deployed than others but consistently fascinating, not least in that it’s fascinating to consider the mind that made them and the minds that gave them the green light. The animation is, at times, disarmingly beautiful, the voice acting is vibrant and characterful and the movie as a whole propels along with magnificent disregard for taste or common sense.
Perhaps, now, you think you know what to expect from Unicorn Wars. That movie you thought you were about to watch? Certainly, it’s not that. But, unless you’ve sought out spoilers – of which there are many, so dense and unpredictable a movie is this – hear this: you’re still thinking wrong. The experience of being taken on a journey to places not just unknown but entirely unconsidered is a most thrilling one and it’s one Vázquez is committed to delivering through every last frame of this unique movie. Credit to him for his ambition; credit, too, to the producers and executives and financiers of whatever manner who allowed him to realize that ambition. Cinema is richer for its indulgences, none of which, by definition, adhere to conventional notions of taste and/or common sense. So what if it doesn’t always work? Cinema is richer for the existence of an ultra-violent slapstick fantasy about teddy bear fascists warring with unicorns in an enchanted forest, richer for its drug-induced psychosis, richer for its cannibalism, richer for its natural history revisionism, richer for all of it.
Photo courtesy of GKIDS
The post Unicorn Wars appeared first on Spectrum Culture.