At various times, this very adult animated fable wore on my patience and I almost shut it off. But the finale… oh the final twenty minutes are so small-scale apocalyptically cruel and misanthropic that it turned me around. It’s a lot to wade through to reach, but it saved the film.

Unicorn Wars is about a war between teddy bears and unicorns. A squad of bears with internal strife and hatreds go out on patrol in the forest… and things go wrong in bloody, viscous ways.

Part of me is deeply cynical about this film. It’s schtick – cute teddy bears who bleed, hate, and kill… har-de-har-har (Oh, and they have visible penises. See how edgy we are? SEE!! DO YOU SEE?!!?) And the “wandering around the forest” thing goes on forever. Cut a good thirty minutes out of the film, they’d have something truly special.

But.. that ending. It just works. It starts by actually giving us a Unicorn War (something I thought they weren’t going to deliver) and the animation and art styles are cool. It’s a satisfyingly low-brow exclamation point on a run-on sentence. But the actual ending… it’s not happy. It’s viscous and sadistic and casually hateful and inevitable. It goes beyond the cutesy-wootsy killer teddy bear gimmick and shows us the pointless inhumanity of war and loathing.

I hope I’m not overselling it… and I hope this review serves as a warning for those with a lower constitution for grimdark stories. But I came away impressed, even though there’s part of me that wanted to shut the thing off half-way through.

Score: 75