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Unicorn Store
Apr. 28th, 2020 09:16 amIn a different movie, the heroine of Unicorn Store might be someone’s manic pixie dream girl. Kit is a quirky, artistic dreamer who just got kicked out of art school because the professors did not appreciate her rainbow kitten aesthetic.
I wouldn’t call Unicorn Store a deconstruction of the manic pixie dream girl trope, exactly, so much as an attempt to give that trope interiority. Most movies look at the manic pixie dream girl from the outside, as a desirable girl who will bring interest and joy to the man who wins her (in fact, it’s fairly clear that Kit’s staid older boss hopes Kit will have that effect on his life). But Brie Larson, who both directs the movie and stars as Kit, takes Kit as the viewpoint character, and explores how this quirkiness has affected her life.
In some ways, it enriches Kit’s life. There’s a scene at the beginning when Kit is still at art school, painting a rainbow-hued self-portrait that takes up a huge block of wall, where you can see her pleasure and concentration as she works on this portrait: she’s totally in the moment, filled with joy as she does this work.
But it’s also isolated her. People (including her art school professors) don’t always get this aesthetic; the movie suggests that she has trouble making friends (“We hoped maybe you had a human friend,” Kit’s mother comments at one point). She’s so wrapped up in her own vision that it sometimes makes her self-centered.
So when The Store contacts Kit, telling her that she can get a pet unicorn if she can just fulfill a few requirements, Kit jumps at the chance. A unicorn friend who will love her forever seems like it will solve her isolation without requiring any big changes on her part - or at least so she hopes, until the Store manager (Samuel Jackson, who plays the part with tinsel in his hair, and is clearly having a marvelous time) tells her that before she can adopt a unicorn, she needs to create “an atmosphere of love” in which it can live.
The set-up has intrigued me ever since I heard about the movie, but now that I’ve seen it, I feel that the execution was uneven. It didn’t embrace its aesthetic quite as wholeheartedly as perhaps it needed to (although I give it props for telling a serious story with a rainbow unicorn kitten aesthetic at all), and it didn’t set up the dimensions of Kit’s problem quite as well as it should have.
In particular, I think we needed just a little more time at the art school (perhaps just one conversation with the art professor who flunks Kit might have done it) - set up what the art school means to Kit so we know what it means when she loses it. Similarly, although we hear that Kit has problems making friends, we needed a bit more show-don’t-tell on this. And because her problems are a bit fuzzy, the solution isn’t (and probably couldn’t be) entirely satisfying.
I wouldn’t call Unicorn Store a deconstruction of the manic pixie dream girl trope, exactly, so much as an attempt to give that trope interiority. Most movies look at the manic pixie dream girl from the outside, as a desirable girl who will bring interest and joy to the man who wins her (in fact, it’s fairly clear that Kit’s staid older boss hopes Kit will have that effect on his life). But Brie Larson, who both directs the movie and stars as Kit, takes Kit as the viewpoint character, and explores how this quirkiness has affected her life.
In some ways, it enriches Kit’s life. There’s a scene at the beginning when Kit is still at art school, painting a rainbow-hued self-portrait that takes up a huge block of wall, where you can see her pleasure and concentration as she works on this portrait: she’s totally in the moment, filled with joy as she does this work.
But it’s also isolated her. People (including her art school professors) don’t always get this aesthetic; the movie suggests that she has trouble making friends (“We hoped maybe you had a human friend,” Kit’s mother comments at one point). She’s so wrapped up in her own vision that it sometimes makes her self-centered.
So when The Store contacts Kit, telling her that she can get a pet unicorn if she can just fulfill a few requirements, Kit jumps at the chance. A unicorn friend who will love her forever seems like it will solve her isolation without requiring any big changes on her part - or at least so she hopes, until the Store manager (Samuel Jackson, who plays the part with tinsel in his hair, and is clearly having a marvelous time) tells her that before she can adopt a unicorn, she needs to create “an atmosphere of love” in which it can live.
The set-up has intrigued me ever since I heard about the movie, but now that I’ve seen it, I feel that the execution was uneven. It didn’t embrace its aesthetic quite as wholeheartedly as perhaps it needed to (although I give it props for telling a serious story with a rainbow unicorn kitten aesthetic at all), and it didn’t set up the dimensions of Kit’s problem quite as well as it should have.
In particular, I think we needed just a little more time at the art school (perhaps just one conversation with the art professor who flunks Kit might have done it) - set up what the art school means to Kit so we know what it means when she loses it. Similarly, although we hear that Kit has problems making friends, we needed a bit more show-don’t-tell on this. And because her problems are a bit fuzzy, the solution isn’t (and probably couldn’t be) entirely satisfying.
