As we plunge further into a world where we’re using computers to make our movies, where flattened color palettes make us feel as if we’re traveling through cities of mud, where we’re letting machines vomit up dead-eyed, grotesque approximations of reality, we can turn to a film like I Am Frankelda and remember that not all is lost.
This Mexican stop-motion animation movie is the sort of thing that can only have been made by people—people who have dreamed, and laughed, and been afraid, and gazed at the universe with wonder. It wears its handmade qualities proudly and vivaciously and reminds us that the joy lies in the work, and in us being able to see the love and care with which creators do that work.
Frankelda is a girl in 19th-century Mexico who dreams of becoming a great writer, but who’s rejected for writing stories that are too fantastical. Meanwhile, down in the Land of Terrors, the creatures from our nightmares are having a crisis because humans aren’t scared of them anymore. The young Prince of Terrors comes up with a plan to bring Frankelda down to his world to help, but standing in their way is the monstrous, spiderlike Procustes, the official royal nightmare teller.
The delight of something like this is that it can do and be whatever its creators can imagine, and so we’re given all manner of bizarre and surprising images and creatures, with dazzling scenes of orange and purple and pink and green, with the flesh melting off an alligator monster as the Land of Terrors begins to fade away, and with a major battle scene that makes us feel as if we’re playing with our favorite action figures, which I mean in the best possible way. It is true that the details of the story can get pretty murky, and it’s not always apparent what the actual rules are in the world we’re given. But with something like this, that’s so full of life and the real art of the human hand, I can only paraphrase one of the great thinkers of our time: Rules? Where we’re going, we don’t need rules.
I Am Frankelda is on Netflix.
