Being Unrealistic
On the stunning 'Revoltoso.'
Welcome! In today’s issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, we’re talking about a piece of stop-motion cubism: Revoltoso (2016).
The leading stop-motion studio in Mexico is Cinema Fantasma. You may know it from Frankelda’s Book of Spooks (2021), its great Max series — soon to be followed by the feature Frankelda and the Prince of Spooks, whose production wrapped a few months ago.
Before the success, though, Cinema Fantasma was an unlikely, quixotic thing. Brothers Roy and Arturo Ambriz opened it in 2011 — hoping to create a stop-motion film from scratch. That was Revoltoso. As Roy said during the project:
It is the first time for all the team that we made an animation. Even the animators learned to animate for this short film. So, we made our own armatures. We made our own props, our own characters that were puppets, our sets.1
There wasn’t money to establish a normal studio. Instead, the Ambriz brothers set up what was, essentially, a giant tent on their parents’ roof in Mexico City. Over time, more and more of the house was converted into a work area. Their parents (a graphic designer and a project manager) were part of it from the start. Cinema Fantasma was a family business whose goal was a half-hour film of world-class quality.2
Mexico has a history with stop motion. See the animation scene in Guadalajara, which contributed to Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. Nevertheless, the Ambriz brothers began without ties to Mexican animation. They “didn’t even know that this [stop-motion] industry really existed” in the country, Roy said.3
They were film and TV majors at CENTRO in Mexico City. The elder brother, Arturo, was preparing to graduate — into a world with few chances to work in the style he and his brother liked. “We were interested in making fantastic animals, period films, adventure films,” he said. Although live action was their training, and del Toro their idol, they had no real opportunity to do their own Pan’s Labyrinth or Hellboy.4
Then an idea came. As Arturo said:
... I was about to finish the four-year degree when I realized that we could do a very good animated film, even though we hadn’t taken animation classes ... because, knowing the principles of cinema, we knew that if we wanted to create an animated film, we could do it. Especially because my brother is an expert in sculpture and special effects.
Stop motion was their answer. “[F]or me personally, as well as for my brother, stop motion is the easiest way to make movies that tell stories,” Arturo said. It uses more of the real world — like real sets and real lights, of the type they’d learned to use in school. Not to mention real props and textures. If you want to add a rock to your film, he noted, you only need to find one.5
Their educational background gave them a fresh perspective on animation. They’d studied live-action masters like Fellini, a favorite of Arturo’s, and Ingmar Bergman. The early stop-motion effects in King Kong (1933) were among their “biggest inspirations,” Arturo said.
Pulling together friends from school, the Ambriz brothers started Revoltoso in July 2011. They chose an eccentric subject for it. Arturo had gotten fixated on a story about a small boar named Jabalito. To this idea, they added the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s, and Jabalito’s love of early film. It was a way to speak about the current troubles in Mexico, the brothers said — by way of the country’s past.6
“We are making this project to express our stand against violence,” the team explained. “The film is about someone who takes the decision to dedicate his life to art creation.”
The styling of Revoltoso was a tough question. The brothers wanted to tell its story through visual design — not script alone. And that led them to a discovery. At a museum exhibition, they read that the first years of film had inspired cubist painting.
The pieces lined up. As it happened, Mexican painters Ángel Zárraga and Diego Rivera adopted cubism in the 1910s. Zárraga’s Le Singe (1916) and Rivera’s revolution-themed Zapatista Landscape (1915) became key references for the Ambriz brothers, alongside the work of Picasso, Jacques Lipchitz, Carlos Mérida and more.
Revoltoso would be a film about the violence, the artistry, the technology and the fast-changing times of the early 20th century, and it would be rendered in the look of its era. In Roy’s words:
... we decided to use this art as inspiration for our short film, like an homage. Because ... the 20th century was a century with many wars and with many destructions, but also it is the century of ... the vanguards of cubism, futurism and all that. So, we think that our main character, Jabalito, is like a cubist artist at that time.
It crystallized into one of the 21st century’s most unexpected stop-motion stories. Jabalito is a wild boar owned by an opponent of the revolution, Don Gonzalo — who’s found a way to domesticate boars. Here is the proof, he says, that Mexico can still be controlled. A filmmaker comes to shoot a documentary about Don Gonzalo’s bizarre mini-society. Then the revolutionaries arrive, and carnage begins.
Caught in the middle are the artists — the musician axolotls in Don Gonzalo’s fountain, and Jabalito himself, a misfit who finds out about the magic of film during the filmmaker’s visit.
This story is realized with a cubist design sense that lights the screen on fire. The characters and their world are all angles — jumbles of shapes and materials that never bore the eye. The team used the imperfections of its materials, and kept the effects practical: greenscreen and most digital effects were avoided. (“We have always loved all productions that use manual techniques, because we feel that it looks real — because it is real,” Roy said.)
Revoltoso was meant to be a six-month job. Like so many beginners, the Ambriz brothers underestimated. Their project took closer to five years.
They were starting from near zero — the gear, the knowledge, the team. Photos from Cinema Fantasma back then show stacks of books: The Illusion of Life, The Cinema of Jan Švankmajer, Hans Bacher’s Dream Worlds, a flipbook of animation from Ponyo.7 Arturo said that they combed through DVD special features for the likes of Coraline, ParaNorman and Fantastic Mr. Fox to see how professional studios worked, pausing to inspect the camera models, lighting setups and so on.
Cinema Fantasma’s name, which roughly translates to Ghost Film, was fitting. It refers to bedsheet ghosts, the studio’s mascots — and the most basic homebrew costume of all. “You take a sheet, you make two holes in it and that is enough for you to be a completely different character,” the brothers said.
They worked mostly full time on Revoltoso, as did much of the team, which tended to number a dozen-plus at any given moment. Roy remarked that they were all “more like volunteers” — the brothers lived with their parents, who were believers in this studio on the roof (and increasingly around the house). It was a group driven by the dream that, one day, they’d have an excellent film that could jumpstart the business. The goal wasn’t wealth, but the chance to make a living with art.
As Arturo said in 2014:
It isn’t like everybody is doing this without receiving a single dime, because when we get money from executive producers ... everybody knows here that if there’s money, we will give money. If there is not money, we should keep working.
Early snippets of Revoltoso became Cinema Fantasma’s resume. They got the team press coverage, business partners and freelance jobs with Cartoon Network. The brothers put long hours into making the studio’s name known. “We have knocked on many doors,” Roy said. There were endless cold emails, attempts to reach out to companies through friends of friends of friends.
Once, in 2013, they got Guillermo del Toro’s attention. He was in Mexico for the Pacific Rim premiere, and the brothers stayed beside the red carpet for hours, ready to hand him a “postcard of the project.” He liked what he saw. It was only a brief interaction, but it was an important one.8
A successful crowdfunding campaign in Mexico, during mid-2013, got them the money and connections to really start producing Revoltoso. But the Kickstarter the following year, to gather the last of the budget, was less successful. The project was close to failing.
Then del Toro responded to their email. He loved the film and wanted to help. Besides his publicity boost, he pledged around 100,000 pesos (roughly $8,000 today) to the campaign.
And so Revoltoso made it, with one catch. During their interactions, del Toro set a condition for Cinema Fantasma. “He told us that he would help us finish Revoltoso,” Arturo said, “as long as we helped other kids when we were in a position to do so, and then those kids would help someone else.”
For filmmakers like himself and like Cinema Fantasma, del Toro told them, the “only thing we have is each other.”
Revoltoso (embedded above) was always an overambitious idea. Realistically, it was going to fail. But this team of beginners still aimed for the pinnacle. Like Arturo said:
... I told everybody that if we didn’t try to make the best animated film in history ... we shouldn’t do it. We should only work on this if we tried to make a masterpiece. That was always the idea. I mean by masterpiece that we needed the best animation, the best production design, the best sound, the best music, the best screenplay, the best cinematography. ... [T]here are a lot of great animated projects that we love, but sometimes they lack, for example, the music or the screenplay. And we wanted to combine all these pieces.
Again, their sights were on people like Fellini and del Toro — and Hayao Miyazaki, another of their very favorites. (One day, Arturo has said, they hope to do the “Mexican Spirited Away.”)
None of it was realistic: the Ambriz brothers and their team were out of their depth. But trying to make a masterpiece got them to an extremely compelling, smart, gorgeous and original film. During production, Roy said that “naivety” had proven to be their “greatest tool.”
What else could inspire so many people to build a studio on a roof, and set out to create an animation empire, when they had no ties or training in the industry? To make a stop-motion film in the 2010s that purposely avoided greenscreen, even with such complex puppets and sets?
In the right hands, a little bit (or a lot) of naivety can turn into a superpower. That, and an awareness that doing things yourself is the only way forward. According to the brothers:
To someone just starting out, [we] would say that what will help them the most is having their own voice and realizing that the advantage and disadvantage of being in Mexico is that no one is going to hire you to do what you want the most, but that [you] have to do it. You can do things from scratch. In other countries, like in the United States, all of [our] animation friends have good jobs, but none of them are doing the jobs they want. And here, since there is no other option, you have to do it.
Being in Mexico forces us to be on the edge of the abyss, so you have to grab your sword and fight with everything.
They’d always known that Revoltoso wouldn’t earn its money back. Shorts are rarely that lucky. Yet the film did the job it was made to do: it got Cinema Fantasma attention. Its festival success — including a state-run award in Japan — showed Mexico that the brothers and their team were on to something.
Eight years later, their Frankelda film is set to be the first Mexican stop-motion feature ever released. Cinema Fantasma is a big deal now. A couple of months ago, del Toro remarked in an interview with the BFI that the studio had grown “really successful.”
The Ambriz brothers still aren’t where they’d expected to be. Arturo said that the younger him had imagined a CV with “three feature films, two series and almost a theme park” on it by 2020. The reality was that Cinema Fantasma was doing its first series, Frankelda, at that time. But Frankelda alone was a huge victory against the odds. As was Revoltoso — a fascinating short film that, by all logic, shouldn’t exist.
That’s our story today! Thanks for reading — we hope you’ve enjoyed.
Cinema Fantasma does special work, and we’ve wanted to cover Revoltoso for quite some time. Its Frankelda film is high on our list of projects to watch. The team reportedly has multiple feature films in the works from here — and, now, the experience to make them happen. We can’t wait.
Until next time!
From the Ambriz brothers’ interview with AnimatorIsland, the main source for the quotes used today.
See the brothers’ interviews with ¡Qué tal Fernanda! and Foro 101 (used several times), plus Revoltoso’s Kickstarter video.
See the interview with Festival Stop Motion MX.
From the Chematlan interview with Arturo Ambriz, a key source.
See Arturo Ambriz’s interview with Alejandro Ocaña, one of our most important sources.
Details from Cinema Fantasma’s archived official site, the Portal Reevon interview with the Ambriz brothers and the brothers’ presentation at Campus Party México in 2015 (another key one).
See this 2012 photo from the Cinema Fantasma Facebook, for example.
From an article by El Norte.
This is awesome, what a cool aesthetic for a film, and incredible ethos behind it for that matter. It makes me think a little of Russian Futurism, though I'm sure both cubists and futurists would balk at the comparison. The difficulty of making a film with one or two people is an enormous filter, but what gets through it tends to be something special. I can't wait to watch this one...