Fantasia Review: I Am Frankelda is a clumsy beauty

It's pretty common for stop-motion movies to include BTS footage over the credits. No matter how many times I've seen such footage, it always blows my mind. The meticulous details, the pain-staking and time-consuming process of moving everything little by little. The numerous pieces that go into every character's facial expressions. It's a lot of fun to see. I was really pleased that I Am Frankelda does so, and goes even further. After a lot of footage that you'd expect, showing the animation process and set-building and whatnot, it starts showing the orchestra playing the score, the voice actors in the booth, the artisans painting and sculpting, people on computers doing things I do not know. It was such a beautiful, bountiful celebration of what a team effort it is to make anything, and it made me so thankful to every person in the credits for putting their time and effort into this movie.

Playing as part of Fantasia's wonderful animated line-up, Roy and Arturo Ambriz's I Am Frankelda has been blaring on my radar since I first learned about it. I went into it ready to love it, expecting to love it even. It seemed right up my alley. So I guess I'll just get it out of the way right up top that the movie didn't hit the way I hoped it would or expected it to. I don't think it's a matter of having too-high expectations -- my knowledge of it was basically that it's a fantastical stop-motion movie that was made in Mexico. But that was enough to get me jazzed. The film is a bit of a mixed bag, but one I'm happy to have watched nonetheless, and also a movie I imagine other people might like more than I did. Who knows?

Yes, I do find Herneval extremely hot

Let's start with the obvious: this is a pretty amazing-looking movie. It feels like it takes inspiration from Tim Burton, Henry Selick, Guillermo del Toro (who receives a really lovely thank-you in the credits), and some classic Disney movies. But it also feels very much like its own thing. I found the scale of some of the sets just staggering, especially the cavernous palace and the sea of hand-clouds on which some of the characters sail in a boat that looks like it's molded after a Viking's alebrije. The art direction for this movie is so on-point, super colorful and imaginative. The characters are fantastical and super-detailed, almost to a point of being too-busy to fully take in. There are times where there is so much in the frame that it borders on overwhelming, or the movements aren't quite fluid enough for the characters to read as intended. But I still really loved their designs. A highlight is when the heads of the seven clans of the Topus Terrentus (we'll get there) meet, each one more creatively designed than the last: a Poison Ivy-esque fairy, a giant two-headed griffin creature, a skeletal coyote ghost. Really cool stuff.

Honestly, that has so much going on visually really helps it, because it makes up for some of the narrative shortcomings, which unfortunately are numerous. It's a really strange thing. I think the story here is actually fairly simple and straightforward, but the way it's explained in the movie is meandering, piecemeal, and confusing. Once I felt like I found my footing in what was happening, then I ended up feeling like the movie was just treading water, sort of repeating itself and going in circles until something finally broke and we made our way into the endgame, which is where things finally started to sail more smoothly.

Here's the gist, at least as I understood it. There are two worlds: the human world (also called the Realm of Existence) and the Topus Terrentus, which is basically built from the stuff of humans' nightmares. The two exist separately from each other, but form a sort of cycle. Within the Topus Terrentus is the royal nightmare writer Proscustes (voiced by an excellent Luis Leonardo Suárez's), a spider-like creature whose best work is far behind him. He's supposed to write nightmares that the king and queen then perform to send into humans' sleep. Once the humans have those nightmares, it provides fuel or structure or something back to the Topus Terrentus. It's a little confusing, to be sure, but the way the film tackles its exposition makes it waaaay more confusing than it needs to be.

Further complicating things is that the two realms are supposed to be impenetrable to each other. But the young prince Herneval is able to travel into the human world at-will. It isn't really explained why, it just is. And in the human world is Francisca, a girl who writes stories about Herneval and his world. I think the gist is that these two characters straddle both worlds, so it makes sense for them to cross the barrier, to become friends, to fall in love, etc. Again, the movie doesn't do a great job at laying it all out.

While there's clearly a lot that has to be explained here, there isn't much in the plot to provide momentum. From the get-go, we understand that Proscustes wants to overthrow the king and queen, and that Herneval wants to figure out a way to save them as the world crumbles due to the lackluster nightmares Proscustes is writing. After a time skip, Herneval ends up recruiting Francisca to come to his land to become the new nightmare writer, which works out well for her since her genre writing isn't appreciated in the human world. There are lies, betrayal, wonder, yada yada. Things definitely pick up toward the end, but by that point, I was pretty frustrated with the movie overall, so I was a bit hesitant to give it back my trust. But I did, and thankfully the last 40 minutes or so are the best in the movie.

And that final 40 minutes gets kicked off with the best song in the movie (yeah, this is a musical!), a sprawling number called "El Príncipe de los Sustos" that is started by the heads of the clans and slowly branches to include almost every character in the movie. It has an incredible epic feel to it, sets the stage for the showdown to come, lets you in to the headspaces of the various characters as we move into the finale. It's really great work, and catch, to boot. I liked the other songs in the movie, too, although I wish there were at least one upbeat song in the bunch. They're all pretty slow and ballad-y, which is okay but I would have loved to see some variety.

If it feels like I'm coming down a bit harsh here, I think it's because I can see how much care and passion were put into this project, and it's frustrating to see that undermined by some poor story-telling decisions and occasional design stumbles. There's still a lot to enjoy here, and like I said before, I think a lot of people will be more forgiving than I find myself able to be in this case. I certainly didn't hate it, but I wish this were tighter and better. As it is, it's still a beautiful and exciting adventure, just one that stumbles quite a bit along the way.