Netflix will debut I Am Frankelda in June, bringing to streaming the first full-length stop-motion feature from Roy and Arturo Ambriz after a long, expensive climb that nearly ended before it reached a screen. Guillermo del Toro, who has mentored Roy Ambriz since the brothers began their first short film 15 years ago, helped push the project across the finish line.
Roy Ambriz called Del Toro “our champion, our knight,” and said the filmmaker had backed them since they started in 2001 with Frankelda, the dark stop-motion fantasy that launched on HBO Latam. The brothers’ new film began as an hour-long special before expanding into a feature set in 19th-century Mexico, and it arrived in theaters in Mexico before Netflix took notice. That theatrical run opened the door to a distribution deal that the brothers could not have secured on their own.
The stakes were unusually high because Mexico’s entertainment industry had never produced a full-length stop-motion movie before I Am Frankelda. Arturo Ambriz said there was “no infrastructure” for work of that scale and described the brothers’ drive as aimed not at shorts but at “great narratives: Long films, long books, trilogies, long series.” He said feature filmmaking had become “an obsession” for them.
Money was the other obstacle. Warner Bros. helped fund the project, but the studio covered only about one-third of the budget. The rest came directly from the Ambriz brothers, who mortgaged their family home to raise the cash. Roy Ambriz said that when they finished the film, “we had a lot of doubts and a lot of debts,” while Arturo Ambriz said, “We didn’t know anything about distribution.”
That is where Del Toro mattered most. He helped seal the Netflix deal while he was working on Frankenstein, giving the project the industry backing it had lacked for years. Arturo Ambriz said it was difficult because “nobody believed that this was going to be the success it is now,” but Netflix did believe enough to agree to distribute it and is also creating an English-language dub. Arturo Ambriz said the dub might be “creating an amazing dub that might be even better than the original Spanish version.”
The film’s path explains why its arrival in June is more than a simple release date. I Am Frankelda is landing as proof that a homegrown stop-motion feature can survive on determination, private debt and the support of a mentor who has watched the brothers for 15 years. What happens next is no longer whether the movie can get made. It is whether audiences outside Mexico now meet it at the scale the Ambriz brothers always wanted.
