Mexican siblings Arturo and Roy Ambriz spent fifteen years building their stop-motion studio, Cinema Fantasma, one music video and short film at a time — all in preparation for a single goal: making a feature. I Am Frankelda, now streaming on Netflix, is that film, and its arrival on the world’s largest streaming platform marks a genuine milestone in Latin American animation.
The movie is a prequel to Frankelda’s Book of Spooks, the Ambriz brothers’ 2021 Cartoon Network Latin America series, and requires no familiarity with it. Set in Mexico in 1866, it follows Francisca Imelda, a gifted young horror writer whose dark stories are rejected by publishers and dismissed by her own family. Her imagination has unknowingly created Topus Terrenus, a dream kingdom of spirits kept alive by human creativity — and when that kingdom begins to wither, a humanoid owl prince named Herneval crosses into the real world to bring her back as its royal nightmare maker.
The production took three and a half years, with twenty animation units running simultaneously and a crew in which ninety-nine percent of the workers were handling their first feature. Puppets were shuttled between sets daily on a schedule the directors describe as requiring constant revision. The mixed-media approach — stop-motion puppets, paper cutouts, hand-drawn sequences, and even live-action shots — was by design, Arturo Ambriz explained, to reflect the internal creative process at the story’s core.
Guillermo del Toro, who has become an active champion for Mexican genre filmmaking, stepped in during post-production to help the brothers refine their visual language — advising on camera placement, narrative flow, and emotional pacing — then helped them secure distribution in Mexico through Cinépolis and negotiate the Netflix deal that gave the film its global platform. The film premiered theatrically in Mexico in October 2025 before Netflix acquired worldwide rights in February.
Critics have responded with strong enthusiasm. The film won the Silver Audience Award for Best Animated Feature at the Fantasia International Film Festival and earned an Annie Award nomination for Best Independent Feature. Reviewers have praised its visual density, tactile physicality, and its almost defiant insistence on handcraft at a moment when AI image generation has become a flashpoint across the animation industry.
Roy Ambriz framed stop-motion’s current cultural resonance bluntly: “It’s the complete opposite of AI. It’s so physical — it’s like those videos of people mixing oil paintings. People want to feel texture, want to feel human objects.” The brothers are already developing their next film, a medieval adventure called Ballad of the Phoenix, which they have been planning for a decade.
