You should see it. It isn't worth the risk of not seeing it if it's something that you might even remotely enjoy. Especially based on what one person says, no matter how much you admire or trust them.
He can dislike it, but if the unicorn had been buddy-movie grateful, disney-movie emotional, it would have been a very different, very shallow, MUCH worse movie. Like just, really really bad.
She's not bitchy or catty or cruel, she literally does not understand humans or their drive or their big emotions. She doesn't feel love, she doesn't feel regret. She doesn't have ambition, she doesn't desire or benefit from change. She barely wants anything. She's complete by herself. She is content.
She can't be ungrateful unless you expect what is essentially a...a kind of immortal spirit, a place, a forest in the shape of a creature, to be in any way at all human. She can't be a deity, that's an extremely human concept, but she is not a normal living thing in any regard whatsoever.
The entire point of the movie is change, and truth. Front to back, it is change and truth, and the destruction of illusions, and surviving it, and the toll that takes, and the gifts it can bring. It's full of tremendous and intense, unthinkable, incomprehensible, destructive, renewing, life-altering change. And also truth, and the unraveling of illusions, which are everywhere in the narrative, and are almost always dangerous, or hiding something that is.
The unicorn unravels everything around her by being the catalyst for change, and it is incredibly destructive. Things come apart around her. It leads to good things, usually, but it breaks everything first.
She changes on the road, she learns to care about humans enough to help them, to save their lives, and that is very much an expression of gratitude.
She just doesn't care about the wizard questing for greatness. It is irrelevant. Glory is useless. And she's right.
She doesn't experience a fundamental alteration of her nature until she is forcibly changed against her will to survive, and it is not a positive change. It ruins her. It is a tremendous trauma that leaves her empty and broken, and eventually, partly and unnaturally human. She keeps losing what she was, and it is tragic and painful to watch. Why would she be grateful for that? She wishes she had died.
She finally develops something like love, but only after she has forgotten much of what she was. Then she desperately grasps onto it as something to replace what she lost.
Her encroaching humanity is killing what she was (her first response to being human was absolute visceral terror at having a mortal, and thus actively dying, body) a trauma response that allows her to survive, to hide. An illusion.
Love is an attempt to make peace with it all, and it is beautiful enough, but also empty. You are never meant to cheer for it. Only feel for them both. It's a sticking point for some people that the romance isn't done well. It isn't meant to feel right. They leaned on it a little hard in the movie, the book does it better, but it was a "kids' movie" (it isn't) so that was a little inevitable.
Change destroys everything, and it breaks everything.
At the end, when she changes back, who is it she appears to, to acknowledge what happened? And who is it she visits and touches and loves and says goodbye to? She is grateful.
The movie/book does exactly what it set out to do, and I have to say that I don't necessarily trust the judgment of people who dismiss it out of hand.
Yes, I saw it young, in the theater, so I imprinted, but it has been a radically different movie at different parts of my life. I've identified with every character in different phases of my life, so it has had the depth to stand up to easily over a hundred viewings by a half dozen versions of myself. I know people have their issues with the style of animation which, whatever, I think it's gorgeous and I also don't consider that a reason to dismiss an otherwise good movie or show (I really dislike the animation style of Gravity Falls, actually, it bores the crap out of me, but that isn't the point). But the story itself is not like anything else I've ever seen.
If you get it, you get it. If you don't, you don't. But wanting her to be grateful and kind is...really super duper extremely not the point, and would actually be antithetical to it and ruin the story as it is. And it's missing the ways she expresses those things. If that's what you take away, that she is somehow morally deficient, you literally did not understand it, or you haven't seen it, or you have a take so radically divergent from mine I am probably incapable of understanding it.
