Your question reminded me of a quick little progress bar I wrote during Nick Patch's Unicode talk at YAPC::NA 2012. I had never messed with unicode before, but he inspired me with the U+1F4A9 on one of his slides. This won't help you the way it is written, but maybe it can inspire you!

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use utf8;

$| = 1;
binmode STDOUT, ":utf8";

my $camel = "\N{U+1F42A}";
my $poop  = "\N{U+1F4A9}";

print $camel;
for (1..60) {
    sleep 1;
    print " $poop";
}
print "\n";
[download]

Also, the other inspiration for this was Perl Object Oriented Programming