Movie Thoughts: The Fairy Princess and the Unicorn (2019)

• Released:  October 24, 2019
• Directed by: Frederico Milella, Aina Järvine
• Running time: 1 hr 25 min
• Rating 2.5/5

Synopsis

In the fantastical realm of Bayala, based on the Schleich toyline with the same name, an evil queen is threatening to take over by keeping all the magic-spreading dragon eggs for herself. It’s up to the twin princesses of the Sun elves to bring the seemingly last dragon egg to their parents before it hatches.

My Thoughts

Very simple fantasy movie. It clearly doesn’t have the biggest budget, and it shows. It really does lack the fine polish a lot of higher-budget movies have. The magical spells look kind of awkward, you see the same type of tree copy-pasted times a hundred, etc. The character designs are very bland and while they don’t exactly have same-face syndrome, they’re pretty hard to tell apart if you don’t look at stuff like their clothes and hair colors.

The character designs otherwise were fine (aside from this one elf girl who looks suspiciously like a young Anna from Frozen), but one thing that really bothered me was the elves’ wings. They may look okay on the figurines, but something about them anatomically just looked off. They never looked big enough or like they moved like real actual wings. It’s not like they didn’t know how to do good-looking wings, since the dragons and ravens have perfectly fine wing designs and animations, but for whatever reason the elves’ wings just looked wrong.

The villain is about as generic as you can get. No motivation or backstory, constantly lets her boring lackeys do all the work and just stands around and monologues a whole lot.

There’s an abundance of exposition that’s delivered very awkwardly and sometimes they even repeat things other characters have mentioned mere minutes before.

The movie feels like it has a very small scale. Despite these seemingly being the great elven kingdoms of Bayala, it feels really empty. There’s no real wildlife aside from the plot-relevant ones we come across, it feels like they only designed thirty or so background characters max, making each kingdom feel more like a small village than an actual kingdom.

It also suffers from too many animal sidekicks. The main villain has her raven, main character girl has her falcon, Jaro has his wolf, the Anna-elf (I seriously couldn’t remember any name other than Lykos and Jaro from this movie, sorry) her raccoon. The raven and the falcon at least do actually partake in the plot, but the wolf and racoon sadly felt completely useless other than to probably sell more toys.

Finally, the title is just utter nonsense. The original title, Bayala: A Magical Adventure would’ve been a completely fine one for this movie. But the one they ended up going with just has so little to do with the actual film. “The Fairy Princess and the Unicorn”. First of all, which fairy princess, there’s three or if you count the queen before her coronation even four central elven princesses in the entire film. Which one of them is the title about? Second, that titular unicorn? Yeah, they appear for two minutes in the entire film max and have no plot relevance whatsoever. The entire movie is about delivering this dragon-hatchling, so I literally have no idea why they chose to include the completely pointless unicorn in the title other than possibly some marketing choice (but even then, since when are dragons not marketable?). They could’ve kept the original title or called it “The Fairy Princesses and the Dragon (Egg)” or whatever and it would’ve been totally fine. This is just downright misleading.

Not a real recommendation, but if you’re curious it’s not outright bad either. Just… cheap and not the greatest.