Fantasia Film Festival 2024 ‘Sunburnt Unicorn’ Review – Alluring Low-Budget Animation

Chris Sawin   |  

Aug 9, 2024

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Frankie (Diana Kaarina) and his father Frankie Sr (Brian Drummond, Dragon Ball Z, Death Note) are driving through the desert with a prestigious school as their destination. Frankie Sr is attempting to convince Frankie to follow in his footsteps and become an engineer. But they get into a car accident and total their car.

Frankie wakes up face down in the blistering heat totally sunburnt with a giant piece of glass stuck in his forehead. His father is nowhere to be found. Frankie soon befriends a tortoise (Kathleen Barr, ReBoot, Ed, Edd, and Eddy) who was split in half from the accident. They agree to guide Frankie through the desert to find his father, but he was last seen being dragged away by the Cactus King (also voiced by Brian Drummond) who mercilessly rules over the desert.

Sunburnt Unicorn is written and directed by Nick Johnson, with animation by Canadian animation studio New Machine Studios Inc. Humans in the film have long and slender appendages not unlike what you’d find in Adventure Time.

Frankie wears knee-high socks and sandals, a green handkerchief around his neck, and a fanny pack draped over his shoulder. His one food source is a knockoff pouch of Capri-Sun. He couldn’t have been more unprepared for this adventure if he tried.

The story of the film is bizarrely introspective. Frankie struggles with his father’s ambition for him to become an engineer. Frankie wants to write and be a poet despite its financial shortcomings. The tortoise, whose guts are hanging out the entire film, is surprisingly hopeful. They (the tortoise has they/them pronouns) have a deep appreciation for life even in the face of death. They welcome whatever is coming their way because it may be inevitable, but it’s also exciting.

Every animal that Frankie comes across, including Tortoise, thinks that he’s a unicorn because of the horn-shaped piece of glass stuck in his head. Frankie corrects these assumptions at first but seems to almost believe that he’s actually a unicorn by the end of the film, and embraces this supposed magic he now possesses.

Frankie and Tortoise get separated constantly throughout the film but are always reunited. They encounter some incredibly eccentric individuals along the way, including three hungry fox pups (Tabitha St. Germain, My Little Pony) that want a unicorn to come to their ominous banquet and a hyper explorer named Cordelia Francis Cabot III (Laara Sadiq, The Breadwinner) that only wants to be remembered for her discoveries.

The Cactus King only has a brief amount of screen time, but he has an unusual design that is truly brought to life by Brian Drummond’s deep tone. The Cactus King is monstrous in size, with eyes on the sides of his head, and a prickly mouth that is always open and doesn’t seem to end; like a spiky cave.

The film ends on a positive note, so the following is just a theory, but it seems like both Frankie and his father could have died in the car crash. The entire film is Frankie wandering around the wasteland of the afterlife and his soul can’t rest until he finds his father.

Tortoise says something about Frankie not being ready to hear the truth about what the desert is late in the film. Frankie survives being in a sandstorm and walking with little to no shelter or water in the desert during the day with pink skin as the only repercussion. He talks to animals and has hallucinations of his body being covered in broken glass. It’s as if he’s a ghost, but simply doesn’t know it yet.

Sunburnt Unicorn feels like a spiritual successor to Gore Verbinski’s Rango with a fraction of the budget. The animation is extremely simple for CGI with the majority of the character designs, but the textures are rather detailed. The visuals are limited thanks to its budget, but also intriguing for the same reason.

The film is dark at times with mild vulgarity and adult themes with an unstable narrative that keeps you intrigued. A sadder ending would have fit the overall mood of the film more, but Sunburnt Unicorn is a drop of hope in the desolate wasteland known as life.