Non-Horror Fans Can Also Come, I Guess, Although Really Who Cares About Them
As artists in every medium and discipline work to define themselves and their creations beyond the reaches of AI slop and content farms, stop motion animation may in fact have become the most perfect form to distill the beauty and care of the handmade, the imperfect, the singular.
Into that argument comes Frankelda, as fully-formed a new icon of horror as any the genre has seen since Bill Skarsgard put on clown makeup and made his eye go in a different direction than you would think/want his eye to go. Brought to us by Roy and Arturo Ambriz and their Cinema Fantasma production company, Frankelda first came to life in Frankelda’s Book of Spooks, available on HBO. Frankelda is a ghostly writer who spins macabre stories alongside her talking book, all the while wary of a dark presence animating the crumbling haunted mansion she occupies.
Book of Spooks is a winning creation, running just five episodes of only 15 minutes or so apiece. While it’s aimed at young audiences, the series nonetheless is not bluffing about its horror bonafides. Frankelda exclusively writes tragedies, and even after the first couple episodes it’s still something of a shock just how grim(m) a fate awaits her young protagonists when they refuse to learn the needed lesson.
If the series has a design flaw, it’s that Frankelda, along with her cranky book and malevolent house, is a far more compelling figure than the fun-sized tales of doom and woe she spins. The final episode only confirms this with an expanded backstory teasing out the life (and afterlife) of frustrated young writer Francisca Imelda, who flees the cloistered world of 19th century Mexico to join the land of nightmares. Having a framing device that outshines the stories between the bookends isn’t an uncommon problem in anthologies, but it’s particularly glaring in this case.
I Am Frankelda neatly solves this issue by moving Frankelda to center stage and reveling in the opportunity to dive deep into the uncanny universe that the series could only tease. Released in Mexico last year to critical and financial success, I Am Frankelda is now available on Netflix. Credited as the first feature length stop motion film made in Mexico, I Am Frankelda is primed to become a Halloween classic, and might just inspire any number of horror-inclined youths to pick up a pen and start crafting their own tales to frighten and astonish.
Expanding on the backstory gleaned from the series, the movie uses its feature length to more fully illustrate the frustrations and limitations of Francisca Imelda’s life. All she wants in the world is to write scary stories, but she is shut down at every turn because her ghoulish subject matter is seen as improper for a fine young lady.
Unbeknownst to her, her monster stories have captured the attention of an actual monster: Herneval, crown prince of the Topus Terrenus, the homeland of the nightmarish and the inhuman. But the Topus Terrenus needs human imagination and fear to exist, and lately the well has been drying up.
Herneval blames the downturn on the output of the current nightmare writer, a preening, pompous hack called Procustes. Procustes happens to be a towering, green-skinned, spider-centaur thing, because animation is just the best. Herneval whisks the renamed Frankelda away so that she can create new nightmares for a modern age, unwittingly setting off a power struggle with Procustes and the leaders of various monster clans that will change all their lives and both worlds.
All of this is imparted to us with quick and confident storytelling. The Ambriz brothers financed the film in part with a budget they were given for a half hour follow-up to their TV series. By their own admission, they decided to take that tiny bit of extra funding and just go for it, cranking out a script and then jumping right into animation. That could have resulted in an energetic but sloppy and half-baked final film, but nothing in the movie feels rushed or half-considered.
And while the film takes it’s time laying out the pieces of its world and plot, it also never feels stagnant. Instead it fairly rockets along, intercutting the parallel tracks of Frankelda and Herneval’s young lives as they move towards an inevitable collision. Nor does the pace slacken once Frankelda has shed her mortal skin in favor of the world of nightmares. Stop motion features in the past, even the great ones, have a tendency to plod along as befitting characters with literal feet of clay. But Frankelda flies, in part thanks to a kinetic camera that swoops and spins and crashes through the artificial world, making the dollhouse sets and their inhabitants feel wonderfully alive.
But there’s no getting past the fact that these are dolls, and that tactile tangibility only adds an even greater magic to the proceedings. With other stop motion films, so much work has gone into smoothing out the jagged edges of the finished animation that the difference between stop motion and CGI is more a matter of aesthetics than anything else.
I Am Frankelda, and Book of Spooks before that, luxuriates in the jagged edge. Fur, hair, and cloth all shuffle from frame to frame, the animators’ loving fingerprints inextricable from the finished film. You feel not only as though you could reach into the screen and pluck any character out, but that you also instinctively know the texture and touch of each element. Because not so long ago you played with toys with that same sort of fur, or hair, or cloth, and when you brought them to life in your imagination they moved with that same paradoxical fluid-stiffness.
On technique alone, I Am Frankelda is a passionate love letter to handmade artistic endeavors, but that’s also very literally the plot of the film. Frankelda, temperamental and impulsive and forever yearning, has a need to create despite the obstacles and complications set against her by two different planes of reality. But she persists despite everything, because that need trumps all other considerations, up to and including her own mortality. With their series and film, the Ambriz brothers have made a call to arms for all those with a similar need. Whether your opponent is a spider-monster or Silicon Valley twerps, there will always be forces who seek to exploit and/or diminish the artist. The question is, will you let them stop you? Or will you follow the lead of an affable blue ghost girl, and write your own ending?
