'Donkey Princess' Debuts in Locarno Competition
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- "Donkey Princess" premiered in international competition at the Locarno Film Festival — the third feature from Chilean animation duo Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña, following "The Wolf House" (their debut) and 2024's "The Hyperboreans."
- The film riffs on Charles Perrault's 17th-century tale "Donkeyskin," a story Disney never adapted; Jacques Demy filmed it in 1970.
- Princess Diana (Antonia Giesen) is suffocated by her father the King (Francisco Melo), who has outlawed love since the queen's death; she falls for commoner Lalo (Andrew Bargstedt), who is banished to a thorn-and-vulture hellscape.
- A wish-granting bracelet transports Diana to contemporary Chile, where she and Lalo both work in pest control — but her father is also transported, as a powerless aging invalid who still burdens her.
- Production designer Natalia Geisse built the patriarchal kingdom from toadstool turrets of cake frosting, fiberglass mountains, and forests of dry branches, tinted in queasy turquoise and puce.
- The narrative moves through multiple temporal and dimensional shifts before concluding in near-total realism, a register shift Variety calls "the biggest surprise" from the directors to date.
Why it matters: The Locarno competition premiere positions León and Cociña as a duo with festival-circuit longevity, and Variety judges the film has "the right balance of accessible and avant-garde components to ensure a life beyond the festival circuit" — broadening distribution prospects even if it doesn't match the 2018 breakout impact of "The Wolf House."
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