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Mexican animation got a nice shoutout this year at Annecy Festival as the country of honor, and this well-deserved spotlight is happening at the right time in history. In the past 10 years alone, Mexico has produced the same number of animated feature films and TV shows than the total of all the previous 50 years put together. Today, Mexico experiences a healthy combination of original intellectual property, work-for-hire studios, schools and festivals that foster collaboration.
“The goal of the Mexican delegation at Annecy is to display the artistry and capabilities of the Mexican animation industry, to find new co-production partners for the studios and showcase our heritage,” says Jordi Iñesta, co-founder of Guadalajara-based Latin American animation festival Pixelatl.
Among the many examples of the past decade’s exponential growth are studios such as Mighty Animation, which started out as a small venture between six friends and currently employs over 400 artists across multiple projects. Before 2014, only one Mexican short, Hasta los huesos (Down to the Bone) directed by René Castillo, was part of the official selection at Annecy Festival. Since then, we can find dozens of films and projects featured at the event each year.
Trailblazing Collaborations
This year’s Annecy Festival included a spotlight on Aztec Batman: Clash of Empires, an original animated feature-length film that places the DC superhero against the backdrop of the history of Mexico and immerses fans around the world in the exciting culture of Mesoamerica. The much-anticipated project is produced entirely in Mexico by Warner Bros. Animation, Ánima and Chatrone, and features top local talent that showcases the region’s abundant art.
“As a Batman fan, the idea captivated me from the first time I heard the words ‘Aztec Batman,’” recalls the film’s director, Juan Meza-Leon. “It’s a radical and totally original concept. It blends fiction and history in a unique manner that elevates Latin American animation to new heights, and it’s all beautifully crafted with the talent of Mexican artists.”
In addition to Aztec Batman, Annecy presented panels and screenings showcasing Mexico’s animated history and most promising programs, as well as the pitching of projects in development. This year’s event also hosted the largest delegation ever to land at the festival, with an estimated number of 300 delegates including studio heads, artists and students.
A Look Back at History
The history of Mexican animation is rich and complex. The landscape of the past century had been mostly self-taught and artisanal. Up until the late 1990s, there were no college degrees specializing in animation. A few lucky artists got into international programs, including the prestigious CalArts or Gobelins, and some of them would come back to Mexico to establish their own training courses or studios.
Small studios emerged through shorts from artists that came from a fine arts and graphic design background, or computer engineers. On the commercial side, thanks to proximity to the U.S., Mexico has always been an international hub for television networks and related services: voice acting, co-production, PR and marketing offices for Latin America. This phenomenon allowed for the birth of the first major work-for-hire studios.
Feature films were produced through public funding. Government programs allowed studios to subsidize animation short film production, script development and post-production through software development initiatives or The Mexican Film Institute. Aspiring directors would have to wait in line, year after year, in the hope of winning the grants or working outside of the industry and using their income for their films.
Great projects came and went, as most efforts were disconnected from each other. Every time the industry was on pace to become a solidified structure, the lack of consistent funding, studio bankruptcy and “brain drain” phases would make all efforts almost vanish overnight. This left a wave of artists who had to start from scratch — repeatedly.
The Economy of Generosity
Although Mexico is one of the major markets in the entertainment industry (highest box office in LatAm and competing with Brazil as the largest video-game market) back in 2010 there was no original intellectual property on Mexican screens. A couple of notable exceptions include Ánima Studio’s El Chavo and the popular Huevocartoon movies. When foreign co-producers started looking for suitable partners, they noticed that the talent was there, but not the production capacity.
Mexico aspired to be a land of creators and original ideas, but the industry quickly learned that to reach that goal the production itself had to be up to international standards. They realized that no studio alone was going to be able to compete or get to work on their own IP with a major network when an opportunity came up.
There are a few key factors that explain the growth of Mexican animation. One is a strong sense of community: Studio heads started reaching out to each other rather than seeing each other as competition and opting to learn from each other and align pipelines. This kept everyone competitive on an international level and allowed studios to hire each other to take on more ambitious contracts.
“Pixelatl might be best known as a festival, but our purpose has been to bring the community together through events,” says Jose Iñesta, director of Pixelatl, the Mexican association founded in 2011 to promote the creation and distribution of animation, games and comic books in the region. “There are now 11 originals in production from Pixelatl alumni, 26 comic books published, 450 jobs connected and over 50 service contracts created in our networking events. We are trying to prove, beyond a doubt, that animation is a medium that our community loves and that we want to see ourselves represented on the screen.”
According to Pixelatl, there are currently 11 features in production, seven in pre-production, three series in production and nine in development in Mexico. Studios such as Boxel, Demente Animation, Mighty, Cinema Fantasma, Aska Animation, Exodo, Anima, Huevocartoon, Fotosíntesis Media, Don Porfirio, Casiopea, Llamarada Animation, Mr. Machin, Gasolina Studios, Viva Calavera!, Banzai, Metacube, AI Animation Studios and Brinca Taller are all creating innovative and original work in conjunction with international partners.
An Era of Auteurs and Opportunities
One of the examples of this new wave of Mexican animation is Cinema Fantasma from Mexico City, founded by Arturo and Roy Ambriz. They started working on their first stop-motion short while in college, setting up a couple of cameras in their childhood home staffed by schoolmates and family. They gained popularity through the years and got to make short format collaborations for popular shows like Rick and Morty and Victor and Valentino. This year, they have eight animation units and have employed over 60 stop-motion specialists, as they are producing the feature film Frankelda’s Book of Spooks for Max. They have also begun production on their second movie and are working on an unannounced series for Hollywood.
“Animation in Mexico is at a decisive point,” say the Ambriz brothers. “As the new generation, we are ready to prove that our creativity and expertise are going to make Mexico to be known as a creative and professional powerhouse. Cinema Fantasma is currently the stop-motion studio with the most hours produced in this technique from the country. Despite the obstacles ahead, we feel happy and proud about what we are achieving.”
Last year, Guadalajara’s El Taller del Chucho played an important role in the production of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio for Netflix. “I thought it was really important for their artistry to be seen in a movie of this caliber,” del Toro told Variety last year. “We needed to segment a section [in the film’s production] that was important to be contained. So, we did the limbo chamber and the funeral procession of the black rabbits [at the Taller]. They created the puppets, the sets, they art-directed and did the cinematography. I also had them animate the puppets Pinocchio and Cricket in one of the longest animation sequences in the entire movie — if not the longest.”
Another studio in the wave of Mexican animation is Casiopea, a female-owned animation studio in Mexico City co-founded by Ana Cruz, who started as an intern at Diez y Media studio and learned about the artistry and craft of animation working on short films. In 2022, Casiopea was one of four studios that worked on the production of the animated feature film Home Is Somewhere Else, an Annecy official selection that is an artistic and heartfelt film about migration, directed by Jorge Villalobos and Carlos Hagerman.
“Collective work and strategic production are the key for the Mexican animation industry, which has very limited budgets to work with,” says Cruz. “Our first feature film was possible because of the optimization of resources and pipelines of four different studios.”
Warner Media Latin America has been a main driving force for original ideas in the region. In 2014, Pablo Zuccarino, current General Manager of Kids, and Hernan La Greca, former Senior Director of Original Productions for Latin America, attended Pixelatl Festival and were surprised by the talent pool and met the future creators for their platforms.
Inventive Approaches
In recent years, a series of initiatives, pilots and short-format experiments with limited budgets also gained popularity on social media. A popular example is Toontorial, which averages between 1 and 12 million hits per episode on YouTube. Upcoming shows include Villainous and the new Rey Mysterio series, which are set to debut on Cartoon Network soon.
As the acclaimed animator, director, writer and creator Jorge R. Gutierrez, the award-winning director of The Book of Life and Maya and the Three and creator of this year’s Annecy Festival poster artwork, points out, “Mexican animation is always special to me because animation as an art form can do so much with so little. Mexican animation can really showcase the monumental vision and epic ambitions of the brilliant artists and storytellers of our beloved country.”
Mighty Animation’s director Luispa Salmón, whose studio produced the Annecy spotlight short Kikiriki, notes, “It’s a challenging time for the global industry as our relationship with content continues to evolve, and production companies are embracing new approaches to content creation. We are witnessing a period of mergers, the rise of artificial intelligence, and even a recent writers’ strike, which calls for a reevaluation of the rules of the game. However, despite these challenges, it also marks a new cycle filled with opportunities, particularly for emerging and dynamic industries like Mexico’s.”
The dream to make it big is alive. What the Mexican studios have learned over the years is that the key to success is embracing their unique Mexican identity. The Mexican way is artistic, inventive and collaborative. The future is full of challenges and as the industry matures new issues will have to be addressed. But now more than ever, you can believe in Mexico and their commitment to animation and the creative industries.
You can recap the Mexican animation presence at Annecy Festival 2023 with the hashtag #MexicoEnAnnecy on social media.
Christian Bermejo is the program manager at Pixelatl and part of the team of curators for the Mexican animation film retrospective at Annecy Festival 2023. He is a producer, writer and self-described animation, comic-book and video-game industry nerd.
