Francisca Imelda wrote ghost stories in a country that kept no shelf for a woman who wrote ghost stories. So she took a name with a man’s hard consonants and a monster’s pedigree — Frankelda — and went on writing into a silence designed to be permanent. I Am Frankelda starts from the cruelty of that arrangement and then does something stranger than vindication: it pulls her, as a ghost, into the one place that ever took her seriously, the kingdom her own imagination built.

Inside that kingdom every monster is hers. The Spooks stalking its corridors are the characters she invented and her readers refused, and a tormented prince named Herneval needs precisely the talent the living world threw away — her ability to write, to hold the seam between the realm of fiction and the realm of existence before both collapse into each other. The premise announces itself as fantasy. The argument underneath it is blunt and unfantastical. Her imagination was never the problem; the audience was, and the film spends its running time proving the imagination right.

Viewers who met these creatures before will feel the change in ambition. Frankelda began life in 2021 as Frankelda’s Book of Spooks, a five-part stop-motion miniseries for Cartoon Network and HBO Max in which the writer-ghost introduced a different monster each episode, anthology style. The feature does not recap that show; it reroutes it. The scares that once arrived one self-contained tale at a time are bound here into a single authored arc with stakes that run the length of the picture, so the property graduates from a collection of bedtime frights into one continuous argument about the person telling them. The mechanics escalate to match: the boundary between fiction and existence is no longer a frame for the week’s creature but the thing the whole story is fighting to keep from tearing.

The method makes that argument literal, which is the single smartest decision in the picture. I Am Frankelda is the first stop-motion feature produced entirely in Mexico, assembled by the Mexico City studio Cinema Fantasma out of more than 140 puppets and roughly fifty sets across four years of work. Brothers Roy and Arturo Ambriz mortgaged family property to finish it. Stop-motion is the slowest, most hand-intensive way to move an image that anyone has ever devised, and the film weaponizes that slowness as its thesis: a woman’s dismissed interior, rebuilt object by painstaking object, until the sheer accumulated labor on screen makes the old dismissal look like the absurd thing it always was.

Guillermo del Toro stands over the project — as mentor, as the name that unlocks rooms, as the filmmaker to whom the picture is dedicated. He guided the directors through part of the process and lent the international visibility a debut feature from an independent Mexican studio could not have bought. But this is not a del Toro film, and the lazy reflex to file it as one quietly repeats the original sin the story is about. The authorship belongs to the Ambriz brothers, and inside the fiction it belongs to the woman they place at the center, whose name had to be a disguise before it was ever allowed to be a title.

That is the wound the fantasy keeps pressing, and it presses harder than family animation usually dares. Frankelda is a Frankenstein-inflected pen name, the survival tactic of every woman who needed a man’s silhouette to be read at all, and the Ambrizes set it inside a specifically Mexican gothic where the dead, the imagined, and the living occupy the same rooms at the same time. The kingdom of Spooks can hand Francisca Imelda the recognition her own century withheld. What it cannot do — what the film refuses to pretend it can do — is give back the century. Vindication and loss share the frame, and neither one cancels the other.

The craft holds that contradiction without flinching. Cinema Fantasma keeps the film physical, textured, and notably darker than the smoothed-over CG mainstream that streaming animation tends to converge toward; the seams and the eeriness are deliberate, the opposite of the interchangeable gloss algorithms reward. Faces are sculpted to unsettle before they charm, and the kingdom is lit like a place that remembers it was dreamed by someone in pain. It is also a musical, and composer Kevin Smithers uses song to carry grief rather than to sweeten it — the numbers move the story toward feeling rather than away from it. The result is a children’s adventure that does not condescend to children and an adult argument that never abandons the children’s adventure. The dual address is not a hedge. It is the subject: who gets to be the author of a story, and who is only ever handed one to consume.

None of this stayed a private bet for long. Before Netflix entered the picture the film had already earned its standing the hard way, on the festival circuit, where a hand-made Mexican feature has to win a room rather than a recommendation engine. It took the Silver Audience Award for best animated feature at Fantasia and a special jury mention alongside it, played Guadalajara and Tokyo, and landed an Annie nomination for best independent feature. Those are the verdicts of people who watch animation for a living, and they arrived before a global audience had the chance to weigh in — which is exactly the sequence the film’s own story would predict. The work was good before it was seen widely; being seen widely was always the part the system controlled.

There is a real irony in how all of this reaches an audience. A defiantly artisanal object — grown on the festival circuit, awarded at Fantasia, released in Mexican cinemas before most of the world had registered the name — now arrives at the largest scale that distribution offers. The least industrial filmmaking method on the planet is being handed the most industrial shelf there is. For once the mismatch flatters both sides. Netflix acquires a film that no greenlight model would have generated on its own and a measure of cultural credibility that money struggles to manufacture; Cinema Fantasma acquires the global readership its heroine spent a lifetime being denied. The bargain is worth watching, because it sketches one of the few routes by which ambitious, hand-built animation can still find the world.

It also lands at a pointed moment for Mexican animation, which has spent years being seen either as del Toro’s orbit or as Hollywood’s outsourcing floor rather than as a cinema with its own authors. I Am Frankelda makes the claim directly: the talent, the craft, and the stories are domestic, and the only thing that was ever missing was the shelf. That a film about an unread woman is the one carrying that flag is not a coincidence the Ambrizes would want you to miss.

I Am Frankelda premieres worldwide on Netflix on June 12, 2026, following its 2025 theatrical run in Mexico and a festival circuit that included Fantasia, Guadalajara, and Tokyo. Directed by Roy and Arturo Ambriz for Cinema Fantasma with Warner Bros. Discovery, the Spanish-language feature runs about 103 minutes and expands the studio’s series Frankelda’s Book of Spooks. The voice cast is led by Mireya Mendoza as Frankelda, with Arturo Mercado Jr. and Luis Leonardo Suárez as Herneval and Carlos Segundo and Beto Castillo among the Spooks.

The film’s wager is that a story about going unread is the surest possible way to be seen. On the evidence of how it was built — by hand, against the odds, one monster at a time — that wager looks won before a single global viewer presses play.

Tags: Netflix, guillermo del toro, Arturo Ambriz, I Am Frankelda