LogIn"It's 2 hours of pure imagination."
Last month, the world met "Mexico's first stop-motion feature," and you know it's good because Guillermo del Toro, the famous filmmaker who shot Blade 2, Hellboy, Pacific Rim, and many other movies.
The project in question is called I Am Frankelda, and it's created by brothers Roy and Arturo Ambriz and their studio Cinema Fantasma.
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Frankelda already has fans because of the brothers' previous work, Frankelda’s Book of Spooks.
"It’s two hours of imagination," Animation Obsessive says. "Frankelda is a girl who wants to be an author and becomes a ghost. She’s called to the world of monsters (something she seems to have partly invented) to write the nightmares that people have in the real world. The monsters’ kingdom is a place of intrigue, and of wild design and animation."
"This is the exact film that I would’ve loved at age 10 or 15," Arturo shared. The movie is filled with magic and unusual creatures. Despite the impressive result done in 3 years of work, "this might be one of the cheapest stop-motion features of all history," the creators think.
"We didn’t have, like, six months of writing the screenplay — no. One week after the screenplay began, we started animating the first and final sequence of the film, in which Frankelda is speaking with the book character. We had no money, so we had no time."
To make it work with a small budget, the studio had to cut a lot of corners: there were no supervisors, and team members did a lot of different work.
The movie was inspired by Gustave Doré’s paintings, who created some illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy.
"They’re filled with detail — there are big monsters resting, and little lizards with two heads crawling in the walls, and people lying in the ground suffering, in big caves and ruins. When we found that, we thought, 'This is exactly how it should look.'"
You can see human touches throughout the film, as imperfect as they are. Stop motion is all about hard work and embracing mistakes, as opposed to AI: "Because, in AI, you get results. And stop motion is the opposite: it’s about the process. All the flaws, everything that shakes, is a celebration of the process. With the presence of AI turning the industry inside out, we are celebrating that everything is handmade."
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I Am Frankelda was filmed with Guillermo del Toro's guidance, who helps the studio "tremendously."
"When we started working on the film, we contacted him, but got few replies back. But, when we finished it, he got really involved. Because that’s the kind of mentor he is. He’s not the one who’s going to make your life easier. You have to show him that you’re willing to do it by yourselves. We always feel he’s like Gandalf.
"Gandalf never grabs the ring, never goes to Mount Doom to throw it. But he’s always there encouraging and giving advice and organizing other people. We are the hobbits. So now he calls in, 'Hi, hobbits. How are you doing?' Because we’ve told him that he’s like Gandalf for us."
Hopefully, this experience will encourage more filmmakers to create stop-motion features. I Am Frankelda will be out in Mexican theaters this fall, so stay tuned and join our 80 Level Talent platform and our new Discord server, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, TikTok, and Threads, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.