Mexico's First Stop-Motion Film Was Almost Never Made
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- Arturo and Roy Ambriz independently financed "I Am Frankelda" — Mexico's first stop-motion animated feature — taking out loans and mortgaging their family home after Warner Brothers Latin America invested roughly 30% of the budget.
- The film took about 3.5 years to produce, with around 20 animation units running simultaneously at the brothers' stop-motion studio Cinema Fantasma, requiring the team to rearrange the production calendar roughly five times a day.
- "I Am Frankelda" functions as both a spinoff and prequel to the brothers' Cartoon Network Latin America anthology series "Frankelda's Book of Spooks," with visual inspiration drawn from Gustave Doré engravings, Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, and Klimt's "The Kiss."
- The "Prince of the Realm of Terrors" musical number transitions from stop-motion to a hand-painted watercolor aesthetic, featuring roughly 700 oil-painted cells created over approximately four months by a team led by art director Anna Colonica.
- Guillermo del Toro, who became the brothers' mentor after they sent him a fan email years ago, advised adding a flashback scene of Francisca with her mother — which was finished just one day before the film's final export — and helped broker the Netflix distribution deal.
- The Ambriz brothers are already in early production on their next feature, "Ballad of the Phoenix," a medieval adventure about a princess training with a phoenix in alchemy, which they describe as a blend of "Game of Thrones" and "The Muppets."
Why it matters: The Ambriz brothers proved a feature-length stop-motion film could be produced in Mexico without major studio backing, but the personal financial risk they absorbed — mortgaging their family home — exposes how thin the support infrastructure for independent animation remains in Latin America. Del Toro's mentorship and his role connecting them to Netflix gave the project global reach that local financing alone could not have delivered.
