Being Unrealistic

On the stunning 'Revoltoso.'

A still from Revoltoso (2016)

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

A snippet of animation from Revoltoso

Stills from the film