The Legend of Frankelda
In 1866 Mexico, a young orphan named Francisca writes horror stories under the pseudonym Frankelda to escape a rigid and deeply depressing daily life. What she doesn’t realize is that her fiction shapes Topus Terrenus in real time, a parallel realm populated by monsters that feed on human fear.
Approached by the prince of that world to become its official storyteller, she finds herself trapped at the heart of a power struggle with a jealous advisor who covets her imagination. A starting point that directly summons the spirit of The NeverEnding Story, with the idea of a porous boundary where literary creation and reality feed on one another.
Initially conceived as a short-form project to fit the anthology structure of the series Frankelda’s Book of Spooks, Frankelda, It’s Me had the luck to become a feature film, in part thanks to the blessing of Guillermo del Toro, the master himself coming to lend a hand to the Ambriz brothers to craft their final cut, and turning this artisanal gamble into a brazen box-office hit in the American market.
You can feel that prestigious lineage in every corner of the frame. The directors here share Del Toro’s same tenderness for the misfits and the same love for strange creatures, never reducing them to mere fairground threats but envisioning them as complex characters with feelings laid bare. There’s also a dash of Tim Burton at his peak (the era when the filmmaker genuinely cherished his weirdos) in Frankelda, with that gothic melancholy and that macabre poetry seeping from every pore of the film.
But above all, the Ambriz brothers give their work a strong voice by weaving in Mexican folklore and legends. The film’s treatment of death and spirits unfolds with disarming authenticity (at moments it evokes LucasArts’ wondrous Grim Fandango), far from the usual touristy clichés of exotica. This sincerity grants the movie a fierce identity and a visual power that would make many blockbusters jealous.
The Handcrafted Imperfection
Visually, the studio Cinema Fantasma has delivered a colossal job on the stop-motion animation. The clay models are stunning, the textures of clothing convincingly real, and the characters expressively alive (special mention to the young Francisca and the spider Procustes). Also noteworthy is the astonishing variety of the bestiary, lined up with dozens of meticulously carved puppets.
Granted, when you compare the result to Laika’s blockbusters (The Star Power of Norman and Coraline), the animation sometimes shows technical stiffness, particularly in the animated sets. And one could fault Frankelda for a few musical pieces that lack punch and lyrical beauty. But far from dragging the spectacle down, these small production missteps lend the whole project extra soul, constantly reminding us of the human scale behind the camera and the budget’s limits.
Beyond its ultra-colorful carnival ambiance, Frankelda unfurls an impressive thematic palette, starting with artistic compulsion as therapy in the face of trauma. The film dissects with remarkable care how fiction can exorcise real-world traumas and help digest the violence of the world. It’s also a portrait of female emancipation driven by a rare intellect, where the heroine must literally fight to protect her work from plagiarism and its political appropriation.
Such artistic and thematic generosity makes Netflix’s handling of the film’s distribution here all the more maddening. By depriving the project of a French-language dub, the platform undercuts access for younger audiences to a tale clearly tailored for them (the film even earned a North American PG-13 rating, in a perplexing move, since there is neither sex, nor violence, nor drug use here). A real waste, adding to the frustration of seeing such a production confined to the small screen rather than granted a theatrical run.
Frankelda, It’s Me is available on Netflix.
