A Singing Unicorn Stars in New Animated Romp Kids Will Love (2024)

Thelma (Brittany Howard) has spent a lifetime dreaming of bigger, better opportunities. Hoping to exchange her farm-pony life for one as a musical sensation, Thelma and her donkey pals Otis (Will Forte) and Reggie (Jon Heder) are The Rusty Buckets, a band ready for their big break. They may have just found it, as they get a chance to audition for the concert of the year—Sparklepalooza. But before they can play a single note, the judges reject them, callously saying they have no “it” factor.

Luckily for Thelma, she’s about to get the makeover of a lifetime, courtesy of a very funny freak accident, in which barrels of glitter and pink paint spill all over her. Throw in a carrot glued to her forehead, and Thelma goes from humble pony to shimmering unicorn in an instant, immediately launching her powerful singing voice into superstardom.

Directed by Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite) and Lynn Wang (Unikitty!), Thelma the Unicorn is the latest feature from Netflix’s animation arm. You typically have an idea of what to expect from older animation studios like Disney, Ghibli, or Laika, but Netflix has been all over the place, largely using third parties to animate their films. Lately, the streaming service has shifted to in-house projects and co-productions like Klaus, The Sea Beast, Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood, and . Those four examples contain four drastically different animation styles—traditional, CG, rotoscope, and stop-motion—so it’s hard to know what exactly to anticipate from Netflix.

Thelma the Unicorn may be setting the blueprint, offering up bright, vibrant colors, fast-paced plotting, and plenty of songs in a quest to deliver satisfying family entertainment. And satisfying—if not quite satiating—is precisely what this film delivers. It’s geared toward kids, and there’s plenty here to keep them happy, as the film races from joke to joke and from one plot development to another in a breezy 80-odd minutes before the credits roll. As a bonus, it all comes with a valuable moral: Stay true to who you are, and you’ll find the success you desire.

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For the adults, there’s enough here to enjoy, but cracks start to show when you look beyond the surface. The animation is largely pleasant. The animal characters look great, and Thelma’s intricately textured hair is beautifully designed. But the backgrounds are flat and lack dimension, the larger crowd work is unimpressive, and the human characters are varying degrees of off-putting. Some of this is clearly by design, some of it not.

Thelma getting thrown into the world of pop stardom leads to an exploration of the price of fame, and while there are some quality jokes about how hard it is to maintain authenticity, it’s all frustratingly—if unsurprisingly—surface-level. Thankfully, the film is often funny, and it's best when leaning into the absurdity that fuels Hess and Wang’s other work. There’s a particularly strong running gag featuring an obsessed fan, and a shockingly dark joke about an urn stands out.

There are also a whole lot of songs. For a film that preaches the importance of authenticity, it’s ironic that the song the movie jokes is generated by AI—an outrageous number about chewing cud—is the most memorable. That would be “Here Comes the Cud,” an absurd parody of Top 40 pop that has Thelma rapping lines like “Yeah, my baby’s table manners are rude / But no one can say he doesn’t chew his food.” It’s nonsensical, yet you’d believe a song this catchy would wind up topping the charts. Unfortunately, most of the music in Thelma the Unicorn lacks the tongue-in-cheek approach of “Cud,” instead going for predictable and generic inspiration about owning who you really are and finding your voice. Those are undeniably valuable messages, but they deserve more creative lyricism and less heavy-handedness than what’s on display here.

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The most compelling reason to watch is the titular unicorn, and particularly Brittany Howard’s performance. Howard, a Grammy-winning musician who rose to prominence in the rock band Alabama Shakes, makes her acting debut in Thelma and lends an earnestness to the pony masquerading as a unicorn. Her own experiences in the music industry make her smart casting, and her passionate delivery makes Thelma loveable. Howard weaves Thelma’s hopes and dreams into the script's commonplace dialogue, turning into something worth investing in. That applies to the songs too, as Howard's earthy, bluesy vocals elevate the more predictable numbers, adding credibility to Thelma’s rapid ascent to the top. When she sounds this good, and this unique, it’s no wonder she’s become an overnight sensation.