Unicorn Wars’ Alberto Vázquez explains his deeply upsetting take on Care Bears
Watching trailers or looking at images from Alberto Vázquez’s shockingly gruesome animated fable Unicorn Wars, viewers may find themselves absently humming a long-forgotten tune: the theme to whichever Care Bears TV show they grew up with. Any resemblance between the murderous, fanatical bears of Unicorn Wars and their kid-friendly counterparts, Vázquez tells Polygon, is entirely deliberate.
“It was a series I really liked when I was little, Care Bears,” the Spanish writer-director and graphic novelist says, speaking partly through an interpreter. “I like playing with animal iconography. Anthropomorphic animals don’t belong to a specific culture or time period. They kind of belong to everyone. They’re part of everyone’s childhood.”
It’s a guarantee that no one’s childhood up until now had Care Bears quite like the ones in Unicorn Wars. While Vázquez’s characters have the rounded, cutesy bodies, big eyes, and pastel colors of characters from children’s shows, they also have visible genitals and notable sex drives, foul mouths, bad tempers, and in some cases, deep-seated psychosis. Their war-focused culture leads to many of the characters being graphically mutilated and murdered as the story unfolds, and the film ends with a profoundly shocking sequence that seems designed to challenge audiences’ endurance.
[Ed. note: This interview features end spoilers for Unicorn Wars.]
But none of this is meant just as edgelord provocation or transgression. In laying out a horrific metaphor about the root causes of war, Vázquez wanted to lean on universal imagery to make sure viewers around the world would watch the film the same way, without seeing specific nationalist intent, or a specific country’s history.
“They’re iconic — and
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