Unico In The Island Of Magic (1983) is Delightful Nightmare Fuel For Kids
Today’s issue of Dust On The VCR is another subscriber request! This film was chosen by James Gilbreath, an important figure from a very specific time in my life. Before I found a full-time job after graduate school, I taught adjunct English classes at a for-profit college called Brown Mackie that eventually disappeared due to low demand (and fraud, apparently). Anyway, James was the chief librarian at our Brown Mackie campus, and he was the only human being in that building that I felt any sort of kinship with, which is why I’m very glad we’ve kept in touch as he’s gone on to bigger and better places (he works for UAB’s library system now!). He’s also a supporter of weird cult films like this one, as I learned from this recommendation. Anyway. Want to request a film for a future issue? Subscribe to the paid version!
One of my favorite film critics raised a good point recently: We’re not making children’s films like we used to.
Sure, there are still a few being released theatrically, but it’s been noticeably scarce as of late. Some would-be kids fare has been upgraded to PG-13, perhaps because studios are trying to please everyone else and alienating small children in the process.* Others are just being released straight to streaming, perhaps because studios have accepted that many families have been priced out of regular trips to the movies.
But there was a glorious time decades ago when our parents were a bit less discerning about what was on the cathode ray tubes. If it was PG, it was probably fair game, even though there was a decent chance you’d be subjected to blood or boobs or bad words. And if it was animated…well, surely any animated film south of Fritz the Cat would be appropriate for small children, right?**
Wrong. Because sometimes those animated films were terrifying.*** Such is the case with Unico In The Island Of Magic.
Reader, I had not seen this film until now, or even heard of it until a couple years ago. But my sister will never forget it. She saw it when she was a kid, and it blessed her with many nightmares. I texted her when I received this viewing assignment in an effort to dust off her childhood trauma, and she responded with “I HATE THAT MOVIE.” (The trauma endures!)
You might be asking “But Jeremy, what’s so scary about a little unicorn critter? He seems nice.” Unico is adorable, to be sure (even though his voice is a bit annoying). But Unico In The Island Of Magic is in the classic fairy tale mold, where complex and relatable themes are sidelined in favor of heroes, villains, and magic.
In this case, the villains and magic are one in the same. Because the real star of the film—the character that makes this an entertaining watch even as a modern adult—is Lord Kuruku, an evil magician who is attempting to exterminate all human life on the planet. (Fun stuff for a kid, right?)
But it gets better, and by “better” I mean “scarier.” Lord Kuruku doesn’t just want to murder all of the humans—he wants to turn all of the human race into “living puppets,” which are really just person-shaped wooden blocks. We actually see him and his apprentice do this on several occasions throughout the film, and then they use those living puppets to create towering buildings throughout Lord Kuruku’s domain on Nightmare Island.**** That’s right, kids, the film spends half its runtime in a setting called Nightmare Island.*****
As for Lord Kuruku’s character design, it’s pretty damn creepy. His body is a weird floating orb shape with a head and arms that appear wherever/however he pleases. His eyes are normally a rich crimson color (to reassure you that he’s evil, of course). And his voice is appropriately maniacal as he oscillates between sneering and snarling, all with a warped/layered vocal filter that I don’t know the correct word for. I would imagine it’s all rather upsetting for younger viewers!
But perhaps the most visually appealing yet potentially unnerving thing about Lord Kuruku is the form he often takes when he’s floating from here to there. We first see him in a dazzling array of rainbow lights, like a huge bubble caught in the sun. It’s the sort of thing that might draw a child in, stimulate their senses, and pique their curiosity…and then that rug gets pulled right out from under them when it turns into an evil magician.
We often talk about films that “wouldn’t get made today,” but we usually say that for more dubious reasons—Disney+ calls them “outdated cultural depictions,” which I think would make a great name for a podcast. But Unico In The Island Of Magic would not be released the same way today. The formula for the animated children’s films has solidified too much, even in crazy ass Japan. They would either dial back the scary elements or lean in harder and rate it PG-13, sacrificing their child audience altogether.
It’s a shame, though. Don’t parents these days know that nightmares build character?
*You should’ve heard the family sitting next to me gasp when Star-Lord dropped an f-bomb in Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3. And I kinda sympathized with them!
**I am rather certain that I was too young to watch Who Framed Roger Rabbit when I did, probably around four or five years old. But God bless my parents for not being overly protective of my movie consumption, because it’s been one of my favorites ever since.
***Even Disney was not exempt from the occasional horrific animated film “for kids” back then. Ever seen The Black Cauldron? Because I hope your four-year-old hasn’t. (My editor John would like to also add The Nightmare Before Christmas, in which Santa Claus is kidnapped, and All Dogs Go To Heaven, which features bad dogs burning in hell.)
****According to Wikipedia, Nightmare Island is off the eastern coast of Sweden.
*****There’s also a brief sequence where Unico and his human friend travel to a place called the Valley of the Demons, which sounds a lot scarier than it is. The “demons” here, perhaps due to a different cultural interpretation of the word, are just cute little monsters who are sad because their parents also got turned into living puppets.
Unico In The Island Of Magic is now streaming on Tubi, Freevee, Crunchyroll, and the Roku Channel, and it is available to rent elsewhere.
***(your editor John is absolutely correct)
The confusion about 'demons' is because Unico is dubbed from Japanese. There are a couple of possibilities what the original word was, either yokai or mamono, both of which are often translated as 'demon' despite neither aligning very well with the western concept. Yokai is a blanket term that lumps together what we would call demons, nature spirits, demigods, ghosts, monsters, and other such things. If English had a word for a category that encompassed every supernatural creature of religion and folklore from angels and demons to monsters like dragons and trolls to fae creatures like faeries and dryads to ghosts and spirits, that word would be used to translate. Since English has no such word, someone decided at some point to translate yokai into 'demons' and that has persisted. The other possibility is that the word was mamono, which is slightly closer as it implies evil or at least mischievous spirits, but still would include a lot of things that no westerner would identify as demons. Most fans of anime or Japanese culture in general eventually encounter this problem as a lot of wildly different characters and creatures that aren't remotely similar to each other besides being supernatural in some way are all referred to as demons.
I remember this movie from when I was a kid. They had it in the local video rental store and it was one of my favorites. Saw something on Reddit about the most horrifying, scary animated villains and it made me think of this insane movie. There were a lot of movies like this in the 70's/80's I believe. The Brave Little Toaster is another nightmare fuel movie for kids, without the excuse of cultural dissonance.