7 Sweet Life Lessons Unicorn Store (Almost) Teaches Us

The Salesman gives Kit three pamphlets on how to prepare for her unicorn, each of which symbolizes various lessons she needs to internalize if she's ever going to balance her inner dreamer with a needed dose of maturity. The first of these lessons is to build her unicorn a worthy home. Recalling the film's symbolism, this implies more than simply building a stable big enough for a pony. What she really needs to build is a home for her dreams.

Kit struggles with this throughout the film. Every time she feels as if her dreams are unworthy, she reacts by boxing up or throwing away the possessions that she most associates with her youth. At the end of the film, Virgil finishes a stable that celebrates Kit's dreams. His completion of the stable right as Kit is beginning to accept that she'll always be a dreamer fits well with the message that our dreams need a proper place to grow.

The problem is that the stable is decorated entirely with dreams from the past. Nothing here symbolizes what Kit wants for her future, because absolutely nothing that happens throughout Kit's journey of self-discovery sets her up for any kind of future at all. Despite her optimism in the closing scene, she ends with just as little direction as she began.

Kit's own home might be more important, since the self-portrait suggests that she's her own unicorn. Unfortunately, she still basically doesn't have one. Her parents assume in an earlier scene that she might move into the stable, and that could still be a possibility - a possibility that would change nothing. Kids, living in your parents' backyard doesn't make you a unicorn. It makes you a squirrel. Which, if we're being honest, has been a better spirit animal for Kit since the beginning.