The Film and Studio That 'Should Not Exist'
Part two of our Annecy 2025 coverage.
Welcome! Glad you could join us for a new edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter.
We’re writing again from France. The Annecy Festival — the top animation event in the world — is ongoing, and we’re there. Every day is a rush to work-in-progress sessions, screenings, interviews. We find ourselves walking often along Lake Annecy, on the path between the main festival grounds and the MIFA area (dedicated to the business side of animation). The Alps, in the haze, stand over the water.
Summer has arrived in Annecy. The sun was still hot in the evening on Wednesday, past 7 o’clock, as we headed to the large Pathé theater. A festival premiere was happening — and people with reservations formed a long line, waiting to get their badges scanned by the volunteers and bags searched by security.
Beside that line stood a couple of filmmakers, greeting each attendee. In their hands were stop-motion puppets. We recognized them as Roy and Arturo Ambriz.
They’re the brothers who lead Cinema Fantasma in Mexico City. The studio began as a massive, white tent on their parents’ roof. It became one of the most unique stop-motion studios anywhere.
Cinema Fantasma’s short Revoltoso (2016), free on YouTube, proved that the team was special — with its cubist designs, and its unexpected story about axolotls, domesticated boars, early film and the Mexican Revolution. Guillermo del Toro endorsed it. They followed that one with Frankelda’s Book of Spooks (2021), a hit series that deserves its success.
This week, Roy and Arturo brought their latest film to Annecy. It’s called I Am Frankelda — and it’s the first stop-motion feature from Mexico.
Especially in its home country, the Frankelda series has fans. A number showed up for this premiere. It was the debut public showing of I Am Frankelda outside Mexico, and it took place in hall six of the Pathé, a smaller room with red padded chairs. People threw paper airplanes, as usual for Annecy. Less usual: more Spanish than French was audible in the aisles.
Someone yelled Frankelda’s name to applause before the screening. When Cinema Fantasma’s logo appeared at the start, the crowd clapped and cheered. Even more noise was made when the logo reappeared at the end.
What came in between was a raucous, loud, messy, full-of-heart, overwhelming film. It’s two hours of imagination, and it’s segmented by big, memorable songs (“Who? Who? The Prince of Spooks!”). The result is bumpy and imperfect — and it has the electric energy that a film only has when the artists really care. We liked it a lot.
Frankelda is a girl who wants to be an author and becomes a ghost. She’s called to the world of monsters (something she seems to have partly invented) to write the nightmares that people have in the real world. The monsters’ kingdom is a place of intrigue, and of wild design and animation. The puppets — like Lady Coyote — are unforgettable.
Most of the audience stayed through the making-of footage at the end, as the credits rolled. Many remained seated until the credits were fully over, applauding at length. The Ambriz brothers were in the room, and they seemed taken aback as people came over to praise the film they’d made.
The directors brought the lingering attendees outside, where twilight had set in and the air had cooled. It was around 10 o’clock now, and a loose meet-and-greet happened on the side of the Pathé building, with the street well below. The voice of Frankelda was there, as were artists from the studio. Roy and Arturo held the puppets of Frankelda and her love interest, the Prince of Spooks, and took photos with fans.
We waited by the sidelines until the crowd thinned — and Arturo had a moment to walk over and speak with us. It was an appointment we’d made before coming to Annecy, and one of our main goals for the week. The conversation, edited for length and clarity and flow, follows.
John (Animation Obsessive): How are you feeling after this premiere?
Arturo Ambriz: I am very tired.
John: [laughs]
Arturo: Because there were a lot of emotions there, and the film was really hard to do. But I think this movie can appeal to a certain kind of person. Many of those people were here tonight, so I’m glad we were able to share our work with this amazing audience.
John: The response in there was really, really good. Were you expecting this, going in?
Arturo: Well, I know that the first 30 minutes of the film are the hardest to understand. It’s a lot of information to cram in, and relationships — and, as in any high fantasy, you have to explain how the system of magic works. I’m always very worried about the first 30 minutes, to see if people are looking at their watches or going to the bathroom.
I know, if they get past that 30-minute mark, they might start enjoying it more and more. When the 30-minute mark hit and nobody had left the theater, I was like, “Okay, now I can relax a little bit.”
John: It’s just so imaginative. I’m a fan of the Frankelda series and Revoltoso, and this is your most over-the-top imaginative work yet. Where did you get that torrent of ideas?
Arturo: Thank you so much. Fortunately or unfortunately enough (it depends on who you ask), we are very inspired by big works of narrative fiction, such as Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, a lot of Song of Ice and Fire. We like a big cast of characters and their relationships and political connections. So, we really wanted to make a film like that.
And there was an extra layer of complexity [in I Am Frankelda], because you have writers, and people who are dreaming and having nightmares, and people writing on the nightmares. It was a little bit like Inception. We had to work on diagrams to understand the layers. When we had that map, the rest was writing the story around it.
I know the film could be 20 minutes less if we didn’t have to explain so much about the mechanics. I’m not sure if we did the right thing or not. But, if we were the audience, we would have enjoyed it. Those are difficult decisions to come to.
John: You make films thinking about your own taste, basically?
Arturo: Yeah. This is the exact film that I would’ve loved at age 10 or 15. I think I was around 15 when I saw Attack of the Clones, or when the Lord of the Rings movies were coming every year, and the Harry Potter ones. Those are my most valuable moments in cinema — like, going to the premiere at midnight, and then buying the DVD and watching the director commentary. It’s very much inspired by that feeling.
John: This is the first Mexican stop-motion feature film. Many people have tried to make these before — there are other projects that have been in the works, but you got out first.
Arturo: We’re glad we were able to make the first one, even though that wasn’t our goal. We thought other ones were going to finish earlier, but they didn’t.
I think we have a lucky-unlucky scenario. Because we’ve had the worst of luck applying for federal funds. We have applied like 16 times, and have never gotten any.
All our career has been working for international clients who are very strict on the deadlines and resource management. If you get funds from the government, they don’t oversee anything. You’re able to spend, and wait. But we’ve done a lot of work for Adult Swim, NFL, Nickelodeon, Mattel — and we have to deliver, always.
So, whenever we start a project, we really want to see it through. Maybe that mindset of doing commercials helped us to reach every milestone and deliver on time and on budget.
John: How many years was this film in the works?
Arturo: The film took us around three years, but most of the work was two years and a half. The extra six months were finishing post-production, re-editing, sound design.
John: And what was the budget you were working with, ultimately?
Arturo: I think, because of Warner Bros. Latin America, we can’t discuss it freely. But I can tell you that this might be one of the cheapest stop-motion features of all history.
We didn’t have, like, six months of writing the screenplay — no. One week after the screenplay began, we started animating the first and final sequence of the film, in which Frankelda is speaking with the book character. We had no money, so we had no time.
Jules (Animation Obsessive): How did you pull the film off on a small budget?
Arturo: We cut a lot of corners. We have almost no supervisors — we have direct contact with everyone, with the artists, with the animators.
And everyone’s doing a lot of work. My brother, for example, is producer-writer-director, and he’s the head character designer. He sculpted all the main characters. Not the extras, but the main characters. Some of them physically; some of them digitally.
Ana Coronilla, who is [over] there, is production designer and art director. All day long, she was working with the artists [who did] painting and set building. At night, she was designing concept art for the next sequences.
John: How many people were involved in the film overall?
Arturo: Around 150 people were with us for two years. There were more people involved in different cities — like the post-production people, or the musicians. But the core crew was 150 people. That’s why there are like 30 of us right now at Annecy, because there were so many crewmembers who really enjoyed this process.
Managing such a big crew was definitely the hardest part of the project. Everyone’s an artist and has different interpretations of what they want the film to become. But teamwork is such an important part of our daily life that we have to make it work.
Jules: What was the writing process like?
Arturo: It was very hard. Specifically, when we were writing, my first daughter was born. At one point, I left my brother in charge of the screenplay. We were communicating while I was, like, holding my baby. I would say, “No, sequence 73 is too difficult to understand!” But my brother definitely did most of the screenplay.
Our rule is that both of us always have to be on board with any idea. If one of us is not on board, we have to convince the other. That’s our rule.
John: This film really expands the Frankelda character from the series. What were your considerations as you were building her out for a feature film?
Arturo: Fortunately enough, that was easy, because we had a lot of discussions for the series about, “Who is this character? What does she want? Where is she going?”
For us, Frankelda has always been, “What would happen if Mary Shelley was not permitted to publish Frankenstein, so she returned as a ghost, very frustrated, because she knows she wrote Frankenstein, and it’s a good novel that nobody will ever read? And what if this Mary Shelley ghost was Mexican?”
When the series was done, the audience had really responded to the fifth episode, which tells the story behind Frankelda. You get to know the character a little bit — before she turned into a ghost and started having this relationship with a book character, who is called Herneval. Cartoon Network Latin America told us, “Instead of doing a second season, what if we make a special focusing on the fifth episode, like what happened after or before?”
We started writing right away. It was supposed to be a 30-minute special. And, in a couple of weeks, we had like 200 pages of script.
John: [laughs]
Arturo: We were like, “How are we going to make this 30 minutes?” So, we had a lot of convincing to do with Cartoon Network LatAm. We reached a very good agreement in which they said, “You’re allowed to find the funding on your own or invest it yourselves, and we will keep in the percentage that we invested.”
That’s how we did it. They gave us the starting money — and they never gave more, but they set this ball rolling.
John: Where did the other funds come from?
Arturo: Oh, it was crazy. We had been saving money to do our first feature for a lot of years. Another film, which is medieval. It’s called Ballad of the Phoenix. But we decided to put anything we had on this project — all our earnings off other client work.
We also got some sponsorships. For example, the sound design studio, the color correction studio and the musician didn’t charge us full price. They charged a very symbolic amount in exchange for a percentage of the film. That’s why we have many co-producers. Whenever we ran out of money — by going to meetings and speaking, we found someone who was able to say, “Okay, I will put in this little extra.”
And, of course, my parents’ house was mortgaged. It was a big family decision to do this film. But — oh, man — we have been trying for so many years to make our first one. So, we had to take this chance.
John: As I understand it, Cinema Fantasma began as a giant tent [on your parents’ roof]. Is it still in the tent space?
Arturo: No, no, we were able to move, but just for this film. We produced a show for Adult Swim called Women Wearing Shoulder Pads at the same time. So, when we had these two projects, we said, “Okay, let’s move.”
Originally, we rented one space, and we were in both. Then we rented another one, so production was happening in three different places. We were like, “Okay, this is not working.” We decided to rent a much bigger space, and we moved out of our parents’ house — our parents’ tent. Maybe now we’ll have to go back because we have no money. We will see; we have to decide that soon.
John: Your team has done amazing work in that tent.
Arturo: Thank you. It’s kind of magical. It’s been hectic [for sure].
I’m glad you’ve seen Revoltoso — in English, it’s called Rebellious, and that’s our company’s spirit. We’re always trying to find ways to make this work. Because this film should not exist. Our studio should not exist. But, if you fight hard enough, the impossible becomes our reality. That’s what we’ve been trying to do all these years.
Jules: The production design in the film is very extravagant — with the massive sets and the detailed puppets. What’s your inspiration for following that kind of maximalism (in a good way)?
Arturo: There are two answers to that question. First of all, the Frankelda’s Book of Spooks series is about monsters visiting the human world. We were very clear that this movie was the opposite: it was humans visiting the monster world. We didn’t know how to design it, and we found the answer in Gustave Doré’s paintings and grabados (engravings).
He did a lot of illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy, and those pieces are amazing. They’re filled with detail — there are big monsters resting, and little lizards with two heads crawling in the walls, and people lying in the ground suffering, in big caves and ruins. When we found that, we thought, “This is exactly how it should look.”
The other answer is, one of the production designers is an incredible artist who used to work a lot with Disney and Pixar, called Bruce Zick. He lives in Portland. We’ve been working with him on various projects [for a while]. And we give him all these ideas, inspiration, the script. We have a lot of meetings with him. Then he retreats to work by himself.
He does these amazing designs that we try to build exactly as he designs them. We don’t like working with a lot of concept artists and then combining them — no. Whatever this man draws, we will build. And he’s happy working with us because we give him that opportunity. I don’t know why, but it seems that it isn’t exactly that way in Hollywood.
Jules: Could you talk a little about the multimedia aspect of the film, like the painted animation?
Arturo: Yeah. That inspiration to use multimedia comes a lot from being here at Annecy.
Our favorite programs are the short film programs. We love seeing work that challenges expectations, and seeing strange things. And we didn’t want this film to feel so… I know it sounds silly, but we didn’t want it to feel like a “corporate movie,” or a standard movie. So, we said, “Let’s add all the experimentation we can.” We have a lot of live-action shots with puppetry. We have oil paintings — that’s a lot of work, like six months of five artists painting daily.
John: The Frankelda film — all of your work — always has this beautiful, flawed quality to it. You embrace the materials, and you don’t shy away from those elements. I think I’ve heard in other interviews that you do it almost as an answer to CGI?
Arturo: Yeah. I used to think that — but now it’s against AI.
Because, in AI, you get results. And stop motion is the opposite: it’s about the process. All the flaws, everything that shakes, is a celebration of the process. With the presence of AI turning the industry inside out, we are celebrating that everything is handmade.
So, yeah, it’s a part of the studio. But… for the next film, we should be a little bit cleaner.
John: [laughs]
Arturo: Yeah. That’s one of my main concerns for the next one, because at some points it’s too much [laughs]. But we were learning.
John: I love old stop motion — the classics from the mid-century and all that. It’s wonderful seeing a 2025 film willing to have the camera get bumped, willing to have the lighting change between frames.
Arturo: Thank you. We were very extreme. In some of the camerawork, the camera crew presented me a flawless camera movement. I was like, “Come on, that will never feel credible, because there were no drones in this production. I want it to look like the cameraman lets go of the handheld camera, and they put it on a crane. It’s like this [lowering his hand with an abrupt stop], it shakes and then goes up.”
So, many of those mistakes were put there on purpose — so it would feel like there was a miniature cameraman working with real dollies and such.
Jules: Do you think that, now that this film has been made, your next projects like Ballad of the Phoenix may come together more easily?
Arturo: I hope so. And I really hope that, since Guillermo del Toro is so involved with us right now, being our mentor (he’s an amazing mentor), he gives us good counsel on how to proceed with the next one. Because the next one, I’m sure, will be better. I cannot wait to start.
John: Has Guillermo del Toro seen the film yet?
Arturo: Yeah! At least two different versions. And he’s helping us tremendously. Tremendously. This is a dream come true.
When we started working on the film, we contacted him, but got few replies back. But, when we finished it, he got really involved. Because that’s the kind of mentor he is. He’s not the one who’s going to make your life easier. You have to show him that you’re willing to do it by yourselves. We always feel he’s like Gandalf.
Gandalf never grabs the ring, never goes to Mount Doom to throw it. But he’s always there encouraging and giving advice and organizing other people. We are the hobbits. So now he calls in, “Hi, hobbits. How are you doing?” Because we’ve told him that he’s like Gandalf for us.
John: That’s amazing. I do have one more question. Mexican stop motion is developing so fast right now — it’s so exciting. Where do you think this is going?
Arturo: My dream come true would be that, every year, there are two or three stop-motion features being produced at the same time. Or maybe four or five, and we could be doing two of them. Another three from other studios, other creators with different backgrounds, in different states.
I really hope that people now think it’s possible because this happened. There was a glass ceiling that had to be shattered. I hope it will be easier. And, on our end, we will keep making feature films till the day we die. Roy and I always speak about making 15 films. We have to make those, so we have to hurry because there are 14 left to do.
Until next time!
the process and every obstacle they encounter is so real for countries where people have just begun, I do understand their ambition of making 15 movies because making only one movie does not make a studio you need many, and more,and after making only one movie you can simply disappear( and that happens a lot) , I wish them all luck, and hope that we international audience will be able to watch it soon! And i wish that more people from all over the world will be able to make us such films.
And thank you for this awesome coverage it's very entertaining and surprising too!
Followed the companies youtube page. I really hope I can catch this on a big screen.