There is something quietly thrilling about a young person who decides exactly what they want to be before the world has a chance to tell them it’s impossible. That’s Francisca Imelda, the beating heart of I Am Frankelda — a girl with ink-stained fingers, a head full of shadows, and a single, burning ambition: to become a famous author of horror stories. She doesn’t dream of princesses or ballrooms or being saved. She dreams of forgotten creatures, cursed forests, and the delicious shiver of a perfectly turned terrible sentence. But the world isn’t always kind to little girls with strange imaginations, so she invents a mask for herself. She adopts the name “Frankelda” — a male pen name, because in her mind, that’s what a serious horror author is supposed to be. Under that name, she writes stories about the Topus Terrenus, a fantastical realm she conjured from pure wonder, a place where magical creatures roam and where danger hides behind every beautiful shadow. Her stories are vivid, weird, and alive. What she doesn’t know yet is that the Topus Terrenus isn’t just something she made up. It’s real. And very soon, it’s going to call her home.
That discovery is both a dream and a gentle nightmare, the kind that writers secretly hope for but never expect. One ordinary moment, Francisca is just a girl with a notebook, struggling to be heard. The next, she is pulled out of her own world and dropped into the one she only thought she knew through words. The Topus Terrenus is everything she wrote about: luminous, strange, breathtaking, and dangerous in ways she can’t quite put into language. And there, waiting for her, is Prince Herneval — charming, desperate, and surprisingly vulnerable for someone with a royal title. He doesn’t offer her a crown or a diamond ring. He offers her something better: a problem that only she can solve. His land is in deep trouble, and he needs her help. At first, Francisca hesitates. But only for a moment. Because inside her chest, that familiar spark catches fire. She isn’t just a girl with an overactive imagination anymore. She’s a hero. She’s a storyteller. She’s the one who gets to decide how this chapter ends. And if she’s being honest, what better inspiration for her next novel than actually living through the plot? So she agrees, not because she’s fearless, but because she understands something important: adventure is just a story that hasn’t been written down yet.
What makes I Am Frankelda truly special, though, is not just the story unfolding in front of you — it’s the painstaking, loving, almost impossible craft behind every single frame. This is a stop-motion animated masterpiece, and you can feel it in every tiny movement, every flickering eyelid, every hand-stitched costume and carefully sculpted expression. Stop-motion is one of the oldest and most demanding forms of animation, requiring relentless patience and an obsessive eye for detail. It’s the art of making something inanimate feel alive through movement, one frame at a time. Directors Arturo and Roy Ambriz have spoken openly about their love for this difficult medium, and they share something else in common with one of animation’s greatest living legends: Guillermo del Toro. Del Toro served as a mentor to the Ambriz brothers, and his influence is all over the film — not because he copied anything, but because he helped them find their own voice. Like del Toro’s gorgeous, Oscar-winning Pinocchio, which also came to life with the help of Netflix, I Am Frankelda celebrates the beauty of the weird, the misunderstood, and the monstrous. There are creatures here that you’ve never seen before, and they don’t exist only to scare you. They exist to remind you that different is beautiful, that strange is powerful, and that even the most frightening things deserve love. Every scene feels like a tiny, handmade world, lit by candlelight and held together by hope.
At its core, though, this is a movie about identity — about who we are when we’re too afraid to be ourselves, and who we become when we finally let the masks fall away. Francisca spent so long hiding behind the name “Frankelda” because she thought that was the only way for a girl like her to be taken seriously. She wanted to be a horror writer, but she thought she had to be someone else to do it. She thought readers would look at a young woman’s name on the cover and dismiss her, so she shrunk herself down and built a wall out of borrowed masculinity. But here’s the beautiful thing about journeys like hers: they don’t just take you to magical places. They take you back to yourself. In the Topus Terrenus, Francisca has to rely not on the name she chose, but on the person she’s always been underneath: brave, imaginative, stubborn, and deeply compassionate. She doesn’t need to become a prince or a warrior or a hero in the traditional sense. She just needs to be fully, unapologetically her. And along the way, she forms an unlikely bond with Herneval — a bond that isn’t rushed or forced, but built on shared fear, mutual respect, and the quiet realization that even princes need someone to believe in them. He sees her magic. She sees his vulnerability. And together, they realize that the real fantasy isn’t just saving a kingdom. It’s finding someone who loves the story of who you really are.
It should come as no surprise that critics have fallen head over heels for this film. It currently holds a 97 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, a number that would be remarkable for any movie — but especially for a stop-motion animated fantasy that could have easily been overlooked in the crowded sea of big-budget releases. So why are people responding so strongly? Because I Am Frankelda is proof that audiences are hungry for something real. We’re surrounded by thousand-part franchises, remakes, and sequels, movies designed by committee to appeal to everyone and no one at the same time. This is the opposite. This is a deeply personal, weird, soulful work of art, made by people who cared about every single string attached to every single puppet. It’s a love letter to imagination itself. It understands that fairy tales aren’t just for children, and that horror stories aren’t just for people who want to be scared. Sometimes, they’re the safest way we have to explore the things we don’t yet understand about ourselves — grief, fear, loneliness, courage, and the unshakeable hope that we can make a difference. It honors Mexican culture not by turning it into a tourist attraction, but by weaving it into the very fabric of the world. It gives us a heroine who is smart, flawed, and relatable. And it does all of this with a visual language so rich, so textured, that you feel like you could reach through the screen and brush your fingers against the set. Don’t miss it. Take the chance. Let yourself believe in magic again.
Because in the end, I Am Frankelda isn’t just a film you watch — it’s a film you feel. It’s the kind of story that stays with you long after the screen goes dark, planting little seeds in your imagination that will keep growing and blooming for a long time. It’s about a young girl who wanted more than ordinary life, and who found extraordinary purpose in the strangest of places. But it’s also about all of us — everyone who has ever felt unseen, unheard, or too weird for the world. It’s about the stories we tell ourselves to survive, and the stories we share to connect. It’s about the family you choose, and the places that feel like home even when they’re made of clay and paint and tiny wire bones. So settle in one evening. Let the beautiful, eerie music wash over you. Let yourself be carried away to a world where every shadow has a name, where every creature has a story, and where a young woman named Francisca Imelda finally learns to stop hiding behind her pen name — and to stand proudly in the light of her own imagination. Because sometimes the bravest thing we can do is not save the world. It’s to write our names on the cover, look the story in the eye, and say: I am the author of my own life. And that’s the most human ending of all.
