Guillermo del Toro 'feels like our Gandalf' say animators behind Mexico's first stop-motion feature

Imagine crafting an entire stop-motion feature with barely any budget, no production supervisors, and just raw imagination. That’s exactly what Mexican brothers Arturo and Roy Ambriz pulled off with I Am Frankelda, the country's first stop-motion animated feature, and it’s already turning heads, including those of some very famous filmmakers.

Guillermo del Toro is a fan. The Oscar-winning director behind Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy, and The Shape of Water, as well as his foray into stop-motion animation with Pinocchio, not only noticed the film, but he also lent his support in a way only he could. (Read our interview with Guillermo del Toro, '8 rules of 3D animation'.)

"When we started working on the film, we contacted him, but got few replies back," says Arturo in a recent interview with Animation Obsessive. “But when we finished it, he got involved… He’s like Gandalf. Gandalf never grabs the ring, never throws it into Mount Doom, but he’s always there, encouraging. We’re the hobbits.”

Del Toro now greets the team with, “Hi hobbits, how are you doing?” It’s the kind of creative mentorship that reflects the spirit of I Am Frankelda. It's a labour of love, built on grit, dreams, and a deep reverence for craft.

Spun from their earlier series, Frankelda’s Book of Spooks, the film tells the story of a girl who longs to be an author and becomes a ghost, charged with writing humanity’s darkest nightmares in a world of monsters she might have created herself. It’s eerie, enchanting, and as vivid as a fever dream, brought to life with influences from Gustave Doré’s haunting Divine Comedy illustrations.

The design work is a triumph of lo-fi artistry and looks on course to be considered one of the best stop-motion animation movies. “This might be one of the cheapest stop-motion features ever made,” Arturo says. “We started animating the first and final scenes just a week after the script was written.”

No money meant no time, and everyone pitched in. Animators doubled as model makers, story artists became editors, and each scene carries the fingerprints of the people behind it. It’s wonky, it’s weird, it’s beautiful.

"In AI, you get results,” Arturo adds. “Stop motion is the opposite: it’s about the process. Everything that shakes is a celebration of the human touch."

And that’s the magic of I Am Frankelda. It’s not just a film, it’s a statement. In an age of algorithms, here’s a world built by hand, frame by painstaking frame. Read our guide to stop-motion animation for more on this resurgent art form.