Handcrafting Magic in a Tent on a Roof
Plus: 'Peanuts,' newsbits.
Welcome! Hope you’re doing well. We’re back with another issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter:
1) Brilliant stop motion from Mexico.
2) The thinking behind the new Peanuts special.
3) Newsbits.
Now, let’s go!
1 – Being unrealistic
Something feels vital about stop motion right now. It’s like the form meets a deep need that isn’t quite getting met elsewhere — a vitamin that’s been missing, or possibly an antidote.
It might be a simple thing: the sense of looking at handmade, imperfect art.
Guillermo del Toro keeps talking along those lines. “To me, there’s a valuable difference between stop motion as an art form and digital,” he said a few years ago. “Stop motion in the early days, where you have the moiré and the flicker of fur and fabric, even the atmospheric dust on the sets, and the imperfection of it was so gorgeous to look at. Because it told you how the thing was done.”
Mexico’s leading stop-motion studio is Cinema Fantasma. You might know it from the series Frankelda’s Book of Spooks — or from I Am Frankelda, due in Mexican theaters this fall. Del Toro’s been helping the team polish the movie’s final cut.
Before it had a name, 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.
It’s an ambitious, unruly piece of animated cubism, cobbled together the manual way. 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 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 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 and kept its visuals 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 handmade 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, it’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 a brief interaction, but 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 (over $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.”)
All of it was far-fetched: the Ambriz brothers and their team were out of their depth. But trying to make a masterpiece got them to a very compelling, smart, gorgeous and original film, whose scuffs only add. 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.
Nine years later, their Frankelda film is the first Mexican stop-motion feature ever released. Cinema Fantasma is a big deal now. Last year, del Toro remarked in an interview with the BFI that the studio had grown “really successful.” He’s into their work. The feature, he told them, marks a turn in animation history.9
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 piece of handmade art that, by all logic, shouldn’t exist.
This is a revised reprint of an article that first ran in our newsletter (behind the paywall) on November 14, 2024.
2 – Animation news worldwide
2.1 – Animating Peanuts in the ‘20s
It’s been years since Apple started bankrolling new Peanuts specials. That business move continues to get attention. The latest entry, A Summer Musical, came out this week to coverage from Billboard, NPR and the New York and Los Angeles Times.
Actually making these things, though, is a creative problem. After all, Charles Schulz died 25 years ago. The director of the original specials, Bill Melendez, came from UPA and early Disney — and he passed away in 2008. They represented another era. How do artists follow after them today?
We asked Erik Wiese, the director of A Summer Musical, about that weight. “Everyone was well aware of how big it was,” he told us by phone. He’s a veteran of shows like Samurai Jack and SpongeBob, and the idea of stepping into the Peanuts-special tradition — with the care and depth that had entailed in the Melendez era — won him over.10
His project turned into a musical at the suggestion of Schulz’s son. What does Peanuts music sound like in the 2020s? “Everybody thinks Vince Guaraldi right away. The music that he did is classic. …. And I think the thing that you really hear the most is the piano,” Wiese said. So, the songwriting job went to pianist Ben Folds. Tracks that felt like a band’s work, with a “DIY quality,” were the aim.
Then there was the visual side. Wiese went for new stuff while looking at Peanuts’ history. “I would use some of that classic Melendez–Schulz staging, but then, because it’s a musical, I was able to break out of that,” he said. One visual idea was to draw the characters younger in old photos by using Schulz’s designs from the ‘50s — rather than “a new version of Charlie Brown that makes him look little, like Muppet Babies.”
The animation involved walking a line as well, in Wiese’s words:
I’m a huge fan of UPA cartoons, and Melendez and that group brought that to the Peanuts specials. There’s a lot of what is called “limited animation” — I don’t like that word, but they had limitations in the budget and time, and so they found really cool and clever ways to get that animation. Now, we have the technology and the budgets to do more fluid animation. But, when you do that, sometimes it doesn’t feel like Peanuts.
So, there was a balancing act there, too, to make things feel “updated.” We’re very, very influenced by Miyazaki, because he can do some really beautiful, fluid moments — but I would also look for those moments where, like, Snoopy could pop to poses. [We’d say,] “Let’s pull some frames and make it snappier.” Or, “Don’t be afraid to do a multi-smear.”
Wiese started A Summer Musical way back in 2021, working with WildBrain, and it’s been done for a while. “I locked picture November of 2023,” he explained. Apple stored it away for timing reasons: the hope was to put as many eyes on it as possible. That’s kind of Wiese’s goal for the project, too — to put more eyes on Peanuts. He said:
... we went in a slightly different direction this time than some of the previous specials, and I hope that it gets a new audience.
I hope that some of the kids out there who are animation fans will notice this more and just fall in love with the Peanuts — just as much as I do, and the generations that have followed it. ... [Peanuts] doesn’t follow the algorithm that you see in so many animated TV shows. We see a lot of anime, and it’s done a certain way. We see a lot of kids’ shows where it’s loud, it’s fast-paced. And, with the Peanuts, you can go into a very calm, introspective, deep world that I don’t think the younger audience has really been exposed to. And yet, meeting them in a halfway place [with our updated approach]. That’s what I’m hoping for.
2.2 – Newsbits
Speaking of Mexico’s Cinema Fantasma, the re:frame crew interviewed the Ambriz brothers and showrunner Gonzalo Cordova about their new series Women Wearing Shoulder Pads.
In America, PBS “approved a 21% budget cut” in response to its defunding by the government, reports Kidscreen. Paula Kerger, who leads the organization, said that “we all face hard choices about the future.”
The Chinese film Nobody is a smash hit: it just broke 1 billion yuan, or roughly $139 million. That puts it above The Boy and the Heron, Suzume and every local 2D feature in the country. Few animated movies pass the billion mark — it’s up there with Chang’an and Nezha now. (Meanwhile, Poison Eye talked to its director.)
Also in China, a recent craze involved posting the entirety of Nezha 2 online in more and more compressed and low-resolution forms. File sizes started at 50 megabytes — and made their way below one kilobyte.
It’s come out that Sony cut a shortsighted deal with Netflix for the American film KPop Demon Hunters, and the studio isn’t reaping many rewards for its own success.
In the Philippines, politician Luigi Villafuerte is making the case for state support for film and TV — and incentives for animation are part of his plan.
As widely reported, a new Russian law allows the banning of any film or show (online or off) that goes against the 17 “traditional values” delineated by the state. It’s now clear that this applies retroactively to film and TV across history.
Hundreds and hundreds of Looney Tunes shorts are now free via the American streaming service Tubi.
In Japan, Toyo Keizai did a multi-part profile on an artist from Myanmar who immigrated to join the anime industry. She revealed a lot about conditions there.
For a short time, the Japanese pilot Unico: Black Cloud, White Feather (1979) is officially free on YouTube. It was directed by Toshio Hirata, also behind the first Unico movie.
Last of all: we looked into the art of the mask, as employed by the stop-motion masters Kihachiro Kawamoto and Jiří Trnka.
Until next time!
From the Ambriz brothers’ interview with AnimatorIsland, the main source for the direct 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.
See Radix’s interview with the Ambriz brothers back in June.
Wiese’s answers have been edited for clarity, flow and length.
As always fab stuff and great resources-muchas gracias!
Great to see Loony Tunes so available. Back in the day going to the movies always included a cartoon as part of the experience and a thrill when you saw who it was going to be,