Annecy 2025: I Am Frankelda Review
© Cinema Fantasma
I Am Frankelda is joyful, creepy, maximalist, musical madness. Mexico’s first stop-motion feature feels like the debut album from a rapper – the culmination of a lifetime of ideas, thoughts and ‘wouldn’t it be cool ifs’ thrown onto one record. Directors Arturo Ambriz, Roy Ambriz and Mireya Mendoza crafted an overwhelming adventure through real and fictional dimensions where delight and confusion are equal parts of its appeal, all while displaying some of the wildest, most ambitious stop-motion ever put to screen.
Established in the film’s opening moments is the dichotomy of two worlds, linked by fiction. In the real world we see Frankelda writing stories as a child, giving birth to these characters in a hellish dimension of nightmares which feels like stepping into every Zelda dungeon mushed together. Every surface is littered with thorny spikes, there are eyes on things that shouldn’t have eyes, and at its centre is a prince named Herneval; something of a human-griffin hybrid who finds a way to cross over to the real world through the power of Frankelda’s writing.
When a writer is the main character of a story, certain themes are unavoidable. You might get commentary about how writers turn their daily life into something more heightened as a means of escape, how inspiration can come from anywhere, how writing can be weaponised for evil or whether or not fantasy can be considered true art if it deviates so wildly from reality, no longer reflecting our true selves. I Am Frankelda shoots to discuss all of them.
Roy & Arturo Ambriz © Cinema Fantasma
The design of the nightmare world where Herneval, his monarch parents and a litany of other horrors reside is itself a testimony to human creativity. What would a world look like where every fictional demon, ghoul and goblin conjured up by human authors all co-existed? We see gargoyle-spiders with green heads a tens of eyes, we see a serpentine mermaid siren with an ability to manipulate with her singing, there’s a humanoid tree branch that looks like a spindly version of Marvel’s Man-Thing, a blindfolded coyote skeleton with dark magical powers also makes an appearance. Its maximalism is commenting on the pure weight of myth and invention humanity has sustained through its entire history. Every few minutes you meet a new ghoulish guy, and it’s delightful.
The villain of the piece, the aforementioned gargoyle-spider, is looking to use Frankelda’s writing to allow these nightmare beings to taunt humans in the real world, as fear is what keeps them alive. His creativity as nightmare master has been dwindling, as is the overall fear felt by humanity. This gets to the heart of horror’s place in our society in a really interesting way. I Am Frankelda posits that horror sits in a middle position of not being respected as an artform but is completely essential to us facing our fears, whether, like Frankelda, we’re working through them by writing, or as an audience, we’re processing our fear through engaging with art. This movie has so much on its mind and expresses it with real intelligence, something it needs to do for a film so chaotic and bursting with ideas. You don’t get time to sit on one of them, but it leaves you with enough for you to ask yourself questions about it.
© Cinema Fantasma
The animation, production design, character design and character animation all need to be at their demented best to bring these things to life, and it’s just astounding to see what they’re able to achieve. I Am Frankeda isn’t just bursting with visual and narrative ideas but also is packed with style in its editing and effects. In the opening moments where Herneval and Frankelda first interact, we see splashes of paint wash away the physical backgrounds, which return with satisfying thuds once Frankelda’s interactions with the arcane are over. Pushing things further, there’s an entire sequence in this movie that’s completely oil-painted, stacking another visual idea on top of a movie overflowing with them.
As if there wasn’t enough going on in the film, I Am Frankelda is also a musical. These set pieces are arenas for the animation to go even more gonzo and depict even more reality-breaking imagery. They also provide a space for the plot to be put into more direct, simple terms. This is super helpful in a film where not everything is directly explained and things move at a crazy pace. The confusion is part of the fun, but the songs at least allow for some repetition to hammer a few things home.
There isn’t anything like I Am Frankelda. It bristles under the weight of all the ideas packed into it, but it never breaks. In fact, the very idea of it bristling is furthering the commentary of the movie in such a fascinating way. It’s intelligent, disgusting, confusing, convoluted and beautifully animated. If you want to go to the cinema and witness things you’ve never seen before, I Am Frankelda is a hellish paradise.