ANI-MOVIES, *I Am Frankelda

For being Mexico's first full-length stop motion animated film, I Am Frankelda was still a little rough around the edges in terms of production quality. The brothers Arturo and Roy Ambriz had worked under Guillermo del Toro and started their own production company called Cinema Fantasma, and put their talents into the original TV series Frankelda's Book Of Spooks which played on HBO Max. The series only lasted 5 episodes and was an anthology of gothic fantasy stories told by the ghostly Frankelda who is trapped inside a castle along with her talking book Herneval, plus each episode was only 15 minutes long, so we didn't get to find out much about our horror hosts that are still imprisoned at the end of the series. The Ambriz brothers planned on doing a half-hour special to act as an origin story for Frankelda, but it was instead decided to turn it into a complete motion picture which was picked up by Netflix. The movie is given an English and Spanish dub, with the talented Mireya Mendoza performing the voice of Frankelda in both languages. The surprise of this film is that it's also a musical with grand sweeping numbers that completely capture the audience's heart, and they are amazing in both English and Spanish. Similar to the works of Henry Selick and Laika Studios, I Am Frankelda was painstakingly done in stop motion which is a long process, and even though not totally up to the high standards of Kubo And The Two Strings or The Nightmare Before Christmas, you can still see the time and heart that were put into it, especially with the detail that was brought to the camera as it captures each frame like a work of art. The film was originally intended be shown in Mexico, but since del Toro had gotten his version of Pinocchio picked up by Netflix, he convinced the streaming service to add this movie on their platform as well, which already had benefited from taking risks with animated films such as Nimona and K-Pop Demon Hunters. I Am Frankelda went on to win several animation awards and became a modest hit on Netflix.

Starting out in Mexico during the mid-19th Century, Francisca Imelda lives with her grandmother after her mother passed away when she was young, and she has plans to be a horror writer. She has her efforts dashed by her overcritical granny and the other kids who don't understand her. What she doesn't know is that what she writes about is actually happening in a parallel dimension called Topus Terrenus ruled by the owl-like king and queen whose son Prince Herneval finds a way to the human realm and overhears Francisca's stories. The world of spooks is slowly disappearing because their singular nightmare maker Procustes doesn't write with the kind of creativity to keep their reality from vanishing. Once Frankelda is slightly older, she lives on her own, but all her efforts to be a writer are dashed when she nearly gives up. Fortunately, Herneval arrives to invite her to Topus Terrenus to become their new nightmare writer, so Francisca changes her name to Frankelda, although Procustes sees this as a threat to his station, so he leads a revolution against the royals with the heads of other nation backing him up. From here, there is a great deal of treachary, manipulation, and intrigue were nerely nobody trusts anyone, and unfortunately divides Frankelda and Herneval's clearly budding romance. The film ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, although it leads into the TV series where Frankelda's spirit along with Herneval are sealed away in a nightmare while at the same time Frankelda's living soul is free to write stories in the world of the living.

I Am Frankelda is a triumph for the future of stop motion animated projects, both short and feature-length. The full film is 113 minutes long and some of the scenes go on longer than they might have need to be. The Ambriz brother have a promising future ahead of them, and hopefully will continue the Frankelda saga since it was unconcluded. This is treated like a genuine musical in both languages and you will probably pull you in considering how memorable each song is. The stop motion is still slightly rough, so it doesn't have the polished look of a Laika production which is relevant for a project of this scale. If you were ensnared into the fantasy vision shown in Pan's Labyrinth, then I Am Frankelda will totally blow you away.