Movie Thoughts: Thelma the Unicorn (2024)

• Released: May 17, 2024
  
• Directed by: Jared Hess, Lynn Wang
• Running time: 1h 33min
• Rating 2.5/5

Synopsis

An ordinary pony gets her chance at stardom when she disguises herself as a unicorn. But soon she realizes her celebrity status comes at a cost: the relationship with her friends. Will she choose stardom or friendship?

My Thoughts

Originally wasn't going to see this movie but what the heck, why not. And what I got was...okay. Nothing more, nothing less. I don't dislike it, but I don't really like it all that much, either. 

The story and characters are honestly just super predictable, which is its main flaw. Which doesn't have to instantly mean something is bad, but if the execution does absolutely nothing new with the material it works with it just leaves the final product feeling repetitive and overdone, as is the case here. 

It also doesn't help that the movie keeps repeating the main moral time ad nauseam. Like it's totally fine to have a moral and even just spell it out for the younger audience, but children aren't stupid and don't need to be told the same thing ten times in the span of an hour and thirty minutes.

Visually this movie is also nothing to write home about. It doesn't look bad, but similar to the plot and characters "generic" is the best way to describe it. It looks fine, but also safe and like nothing new was really brought to the table. The animation was fine, the designs were fine, the effects were fine, it's all just fine but nothing more than that. I will give it credit that I like Thelma's pony design, but aside from that this is just a very basic looking movie for today's standards.

The humor is something that was honestly also just okay. I did laugh a few times but again it can also be annoying and is nothing really all that inventive.

Also just as an aside, I do have to bring up how this movie has a horse character whose entire gimmick is that he ruminates. Which is just so stupid because horses cannot ruminate. It doesn't make the movie's creators look like they exactly gave a shit when they didn't even bother to google "are horses ruminants?".

So overall this is a perfectly average movie. It's fine visually, story-wise, character-wise, moral-wise and humor-wise. But also it does absolutely nothing to stand out from the crowd, leaving it forgettable and generic.