Unicorn Wars

Alberto Vázquez is a Galician illustrator and animator who has spent his career making very dark things look extremely cute. Unicorn Wars won the Goya for Best Animated Film in 2023 and competed at Annecy, and it is the most upsetting cartoon many people will ever sit through.

The teddy bears have a religion. Their sacred text tells them the last unicorn's blood will make the beautiful bear more beautiful still, and they have been at war with the unicorns of the forest for generations. A squad of recruits goes through basic training under a sadistic drill sergeant, then into the woods. Two of them are brothers: Azulín, who has been damaged by envy since childhood, and Gordi, who is kind. Vázquez animates it in a bright, round, Care Bears register and then puts it through a wringer of Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket and body horror, with a genuinely upsetting sequence involving hallucinogenic caterpillars.

The satire is aimed at militarised religion and at the stories groups tell themselves to justify extermination, and it is not subtle — Vázquez has said he does not think the subject rewards subtlety. Whether the contrast between form and content strikes you as brilliant or adolescent tends to be settled in the first ten minutes. Either way it is one of the boldest things European animation has produced this decade.