You can talk without fear, even though it’s still festive days. ‘unicorn wars’ (Official Fantàstic Competition and Anima’t) was the most surprising film of the competition this year in Sitges. It doesn’t matter what you think you know about him or his author, the brilliant Galician illustrator and animation director. Alberto Vazquez, winner of Goya for ‘Psychonauts, Forgotten Children’ in 2017. Nothing can prepare you for the multi-level opposition games of this colorful but bitter anti-war, environmental and feminist story.
Again, Vázquez uses great images to talk about a very real rudeness, but this time it was specifically kamikaze. From the very beginning, he confronts bears and unicorns, symbols of cuteness, in a bloody battle. First, all men are scary for their arrogance. Second, the all-female has the (misleading) aspect of a demonic figure. “I always wanted to look for contrast,” explains Vázquez. “Also among the hues: it starts out as a comedy and gets more and more dramatic, even through horror, then gets more emotional or goes back to humor. I wanted to surprise and provoke, but not to provoke. I was interested in provoking emotions.”
holy and family war
Like ‘Psychonauts, forgotten children’, the project began as a comic book and became a short film (‘Unicorn Blood’ from 2013) before being expanded into a feature film. “In the short film, we saw two little bears hunting unicorns because their blood tasted like blueberries. That was my way of approaching the drama of ‘bullying’. I decided to take this universe and expand it and mix it with a war genre and a religious and mythological story.”
in the movie, While bear cubs are citizens of a militarized and religious society, unicorns roam freely in the Enchanted Forest, a region the ancients wanted to reconquer, considering it their own by divine right.. In addition to this holy war, Vázquez presents us in more detail the intimate battle between two little bears, brothers Azulín and Gordi, for their mother’s love: “I studied at a Catholic school. I love religious depictions, which is particularly brutal and one of my favorite fiction books. medieval codices or the Old Testament. How do myths and great universal myths mingle with petty myths and family wars?“.
six years of effort
It took nearly six years, with some time spent securing funding, to make this strange dream of the so-called ‘unicorn wars’ a reality. “It’s hard to get money for these kinds of movies. Actually, animation industry is dominated by children’s movies“Forget it, let’s be warned, ‘Unicorn wars’ isn’t like that at all. This type of project takes time and time equals money. It makes me jealous when a live-action director says he shoots in a month. In animation this is impossible. Although we make movies, we’re more like a video game studio, with fifty people working for years, what the rent and salary means each month.“.
Most of the ‘Psychonauts’ team was joined by two French studios, one from Paris and the other from Angoulême. Dedicated to 2D, Vázquez left his 3D business to France. “Almost the entire movie is traditional animation. Difference between unicorns, but we repainted the tops to make even these look handcrafted. 3D solved the problem of fighting thirty horses on camera. Bringing horses to life is not easy!”