Xico's Journey

Veronica Castro showed up to voice a hairless dog

The card on Netflix says Xico's Journey. In Mexico the title is El camino de Xico, an 86-minute 2D feature from Anima Estudios. The dog is a Xoloitzcuintle. latestnetflix.com's read is that the industry chatter is the guest list, not a leaked salary.

TVCinews, pumping the November 2020 opening, named Veronica Castro, Victor Trujillo, Enrique Guzman, El Hijo del Santo, Carla Medina, and writer Elena Poniatowska among the voices. The same piece said Paulina Rubio already had a song titled "Xico" in circulation, and that Lila Downs, Alex Lora, Jay de la Cueva, Randy Ebright of Molotov, Juan Pablo Manzanero, and Marco Antonio Solis were in the mix. That is a telenovela empress, a lucha libre heir, a celebrated journalist, and a rock guitarist sharing a children's cartoon.

A boutique mascot with a mountain to save

Wikipedia traces the character to Cristina Pineda, the designer behind the Pineda Covalin luxury line, who also produced. Eric D. Cabello Diaz directed his first feature. Enrique Renteria wrote. Fernando de Fuentes and Jose C. Garcia de Letona produced with Pineda. Spanish Wikipedia calls it Anima's second original 2D feature after years away from original 2D theatrical ideas.

The story is blunt. A corporation wants the mountain that protects a town. A girl named Copi, her friend Gus, and the dog walk in. Xico turns out to be magic. Netflix keeps the gold-hungry company in the logline. Veronica Alva voices Copi. Pablo Gama Iturraran, billed as Mago Gamini, voices Xico. Luis Angel Jaramillo voices Gus.

Cine Canibal opened it in Mexican theaters on 12 November 2020, in the middle of the pandemic. Wikipedia's English page puts the theatrical take at about $0.1 million, with a listed gross of $119,373. Netflix took worldwide rights outside Mexico on 12 February 2021.

Kids-row placement did the rest. A celebrity-stuffed Mexican cartoon barely registers at the multiplex, then lands next to bigger studio animals. Rotten Tomatoes gathered almost no critic writing. Nobody published a recording-stage blowup. The curiosity is taste. You can hear Castro and Poniatowska inside a mining parable for children. You can hear Molotov's guitarist as the corporate heavy, billed as Senor Caradura.

The English dub swapped in Lola Raie as Copi and Adan Rocha as Xico. The Spanish track is the one with the famous names. TMDB still files the original title as El camino de Xico and the U.S. Streaming date as 12 February 2021. That is the movie Netflix kept, not a rumor about a cancelled sequel.