Sangre de Unicornio
2013 · 8m · Spain
Directed by Alberto Vázquez
Genres: animation, dark comedy, fantasy
Tones: darkly comic, mythic, surreal
Two teddy-bear brothers, Moffy and Gregorio, hunt unicorns — whose tender meat and sweet, blueberry-tasting blood they need to stay beautiful — as brotherly rivalry turns their storybook quest bloody.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Vázquez takes the twee aesthetic of children's animation and weaponizes it — those soft teddy bears gutting mythical creatures for vanity is exactly the kind of premise that makes consensus taste squirm, and he refuses to wink at the audience about it. This is subversion that doesn't announce itself, which is why it actually works.
The film's formal restraint — its commitment to storybook flatness even as the violence escalates — shows a director aware of animation's lineage and willing to pervert it with surgical precision; there's a clear conversation happening here with the traditions Vázquez is deliberately corrupting.
The decision to keep the animation style innocent and almost gentle while the narrative turns genuinely grotesque creates a friction that cheaper or more illustrative work would immediately collapse under; that tonal discipline is what transforms a dark-comedy premise into something that actually haunts.
Reviews
Au final, « Sangre de Unicornio » fait penser à un carambolage entre « Bob l'éponge » et un film d'horreur espagnol d'Álex de la Iglesia, mais sa singularité se trouve dans l'ironie cruelle face aux mythes qu'il explore. Le mélange est détonnant, le film efficace et marquant.