I Am Frankelda

“I Am Frankelda”: The Stop‑Motion Nightmare That Nearly Ate Its Creators Alive

You thought the monsters were trapped on screen? Think again. latestnetflix.com's take is that the making of I Am Frankelda (aka Soy Frankelda) was a wild ride of self-funding chaos, family hustle, and one very opinionated Guillermo del Toro hovering over the edit like a benevolent ghost.

Family Studio or Gothic Cult? Inside Cinema Fantasma

• The movie wasn’t just about a haunted book — it was made by what basically amounts to a single haunted house in Mexico City. The studio, Cinema Fantasma, was founded by brothers Roy and Arturo Ambriz… in their family home. - Nearly the entire clan is on the payroll:
• Dad: project manager and studio organizer. - Roy’s wife, Ana Coronilla: art director for both the series and the film. - Arturo’s wife, Irene Melis: cinematographer. - Their mother: graphic designer who chips in on props, wardrobe, painting, and overall visual design. - The vibe? Think “gothic little family empire”: handmade monsters, stop‑motion sets everywhere, and relatives quietly running half the departments behind the curtain.

From 30 Minutes to a Full Movie: The ‘Impossible’ Upgrade

• The Frankelda project started as a modest 30‑minute special for HBO Max/Warner Bros. Discovery. Then the Ambriz brothers did the most chaotic thing imaginable: they decided, midstream, to turn it into a full-on feature film. - Funding for a full feature? Absolutely not. Warner covered only a small slice; every grant or institutional support they chased in Mexico basically said: you can’t do a feature‑length stop‑motion here.
• Their response was essentially: “Watch us.” They self‑funded the rest on the fly, pouring personal money into longer runtimes, more puppets, and bigger sets. - The workflow became pure adrenaline:
• They started writing the screenplay…
• Three weeks later they were already animating. Writing, editing, building, and animating all at once — a “fun and messy” process even they admit they might never repeat.

Guillermo del Toro: The Ghost in the Editing Room

• Enter horror legend and stop‑motion king Guillermo del Toro, who took the Ambriz brothers under his wing. He’s described as a mentor, but functionally he was a third, spectral director. - Del Toro didn’t just send notes — he called them daily on video chats, watching new shots and giving brutally practical feedback on pacing, shot design, and the emotional spine of scenes. - He laser‑focused on the opening sequence of Francisca with her mother, “deconstructing” it to set the emotional language of the whole film. - The film first played longer at festivals (Guadalajara, Annecy). Then, with Del Toro’s guidance, they chopped more than 15 minutes so “the best parts of the film could stand out.”
• Fans in Mexico still talk about the longer cut; some lament deleted material — including additional material featuring characters like Ceimut and Lady Cotote — that never made it into the final, wider‑release version.

Monsters, Miniatures, and 200 Oil Paintings

• Stop‑motion hell, thy name is Procustes: in the series he appears in just a few shots, but in the feature he suddenly has the most dialogue and is constantly walking, climbing, fighting, singing, dancing — all while being heavy, over‑rigged, and covered in painstakingly hand‑poked hair. - To survive the schedule, the crew built mini versions of every character halfway through production and used them for full and long shots, cutting down on rigging and animation time. - One showstopper sequence, “The Prince of the Reign of Terrors,” was designed as their big, experimental swing:
• Inspired by Les Misérables‑style musical bombast. - Packed with monsters belting their hearts out. - Layered with around 200 oil paintings inserted into the scene to push the surreal, operatic vibe. - The visual world pulls from Platonic philosophy, Renaissance monsters, Gustave Doré engravings, surrealist painters, and even Mexican axolotls (yes, the mermaid has axolotl influence baked into her design).

From “Impossible” to Box Office Phenomenon

• Everyone said a Mexican stop‑motion feature couldn’t work. Then I Am Frankelda hit theaters in 2025 and torched expectations: it became one of the highest‑grossing films in Mexico that year (third overall, including live action) and the highest‑grossing animated film since the pandemic. - Festival cred followed: it collected the Satoshi Kon Award at Fantasia and picked up Best Independent Feature buzz at the Annie Awards. - The success pushed Netflix to swoop in, acquiring the film for global release and positioning Frankelda as an international spooky queen. - And audiences didn’t just clap and go home: they spawned Frankelda tattoos, quinceañeras, cakes, piñatas, fan art, cosplay, and musical covers — turning this little “impossible” feature into a full‑blown cult phenomenon.

Singing, Screaming, and Surviving

• The cast — including Mireya Mendoza, Arturo Mercado Jr., and Luis Leonardo Suárez — aren’t just voices; they’re essentially in a two‑hour musical marathon. Reports from the filmmakers note that the entire cast sings their hearts out, carrying the dark‑fantasy operetta tone. - Behind that polished nightmare is a scrappy crew of over 100 people at peak production, many of them trained in‑house through the Cinema Fantasma Edu initiative — the brothers’ way of seeding more Mexican stop‑motion talent for the future.

Bottom line: I Am Frankelda isn’t just Mexico’s first stop‑motion feature; it’s a financially reckless, family‑run, Del‑Toro‑supervised fever dream that somehow morphed into a box office hit and global cult object. The monsters on screen are scary — but the real horror was probably the production schedule.