Fantasia 2025: I am Frankelda, The Devil’s Bride, Cielo | Festivals and awards

Folklore and fantasy are nothing new to Fantasia International Film Festival, but this year’s programming presents a lot of photos that capture the ability of cinema to grasp the surrealist. We have Lithuanian rock operas, the first feature film in Mexico, and the fantasy of a child in Bolivia, who all play with the imagination of humanity as a means of understanding the disorderly world around us.

The first is perhaps one of the most prominent titles in the Fest, and certainly one of the most meticulously built love work: “I am Frankelda”, Ambriz brothers, founders of the Mexican Stop-Motion Studio Fantama studio. The film is the first animated feature in Mexico, strongly co -signed and produced by the fantastic lighting Guillermo del Toro, which naturally puts high expectations. From point to tail, “Frankelda” feels valid in the meticulous years of work that the studio has put, building a lush and complex fable which adapts perfectly alongside the other works of the master.

Assign an atmosphere similar to “The Nightmare Before Christmas” by Henry Selick (also playing in retrospective in the festal of this year), “Frankelda” extends the HBO Max musical series of the Ambriz “Frankelda, a fantastic world filled with baroque creatures whose conceptions evoke the Sharp Lines lines and the wealthy colors of Mexican art. These are the fellow literals of Francisca Imelda (Mireya Mendoza), a young woman whose imaginative stories are rejected by the publishers; No one wants the fancy thefts of a female author.

But she does not know that her creations are real, and their world depends on a fragile economy of nightmares spun by Arachnid and Royal Nightmarier without scruples (Luis Leonardo Suarez) to keep the flow of ideas between the kingdoms of reality and fiction alive. But when the inspiration of procustes begins to decline, the country of frightening begins to decline; In despair, Herneval pierces the veil between the worlds to bring Francisca (taking the feather name Frankelda) to her world to light it with his creativity.

It is difficult to overestimate how incredible “Frankelda” is, with its designs of lively characters and its magnificently expansive built sets. Living dragon ships sail in cloud oceans, with striking hands waving in the breeze; The country of break -ins is populated by all kinds of narcotic creatures of a chief of clan similar to Medusa to a skeletal mammoth goalkeeper. Everything is so ambitious, and the film takes great care to avoid collapsing under the weight of all its mythology by melting it in very elementary ideas of imagination and the agency that we all want on our own creativity. (The songs help it; they are rare but gratifying when they appear – the “King of the Spooks” leading to the end of the second act is a highest point.)

At almost two hours, “I am Frankelda” sometimes sags in places; During the questions and answers, the filmmakers revealed that it was the prolonged cut of the film, and Del Toro works with them to reduce it over a more manageable length. But even if this is the case, “Frankelda” looks like an astounding achievement in Mexican animation, a bold shine of culturally specific fantasy which carries each ounce of ambition on its perfectly designed sleeve.

Fantasia’s retrospectives are still a treat, but one of the most fascinating this year must be 1974 “The devil’s bride”, “ A Lithuanian rock opera (at the time when Lithuania was part of the Soviet Union) telling the fantastic novel of Kazys Boruta “Baltaragis’s Mill” through the blurred bar and the pseudo-disco rhythms of something like “Jesus Christ Superstar”. Recently, a 4K restoration of Deaf Crocodile, “Devil’s Bride”, spends all of its 78 -minute execution time launching you in a dizzying fan of characters, ideas and scenarios so shambolic that you only have to launch your hands and get back to music. And if you do it, it’s a treat.

The film by Arūnas žebriūnas opens with a rapid note of exhibition, resulting from Lithuanian folk tales: it is a period of angels and demons, and some of these fantastic creatures have found their way on earth to wreak havoc and test people. Then, through the literal framing device of a golden frame holding a still life of our opening blow, he launches you in the first excitable electric musical sequences of Vyacheslav Ganelin, as a horde of hedonist songs, start to make dresses and enjoy his Throne, looking at all of this.

From there, we faufil in the main story, one of the good deals of the Devil Classic: the Imish Pinchiukas (Gediminas Girdvainis) conclude an agreement with the premises Miller Baltaragis (Vasyl Symchych) to help him work (and capture the attention of the local beauty of local beauty [Vaiva Mainelyte]) In exchange for the girl’s hand, they will bear. But the good deal quickly becomes sour when Baltaragis’ wife dies shortly after childbirth, and it becomes extremely protective of the young jurga (also mainly) as it grows. Reaching adulthood and approaching the date of maturity of their agreement, Baltaragis begins to conceive of ways to ward off Pinchiukas’s designs on his daughter, especially as a beautiful Girdvainis (Dégimantas Adomaitis) also has her eye on her.

This kind of good deal Faustian is mature for the treatment of the rock opera (look at “Phantom of the Paradise”), but “The Devil’s Bride” takes its curious mixture of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Fantastic Soviet films by Alexander Rou at Batshit Crazy Heights (Think “Baba Yaga Superstar”). And keep in mind that it is a pure rock * opera, entirely sung through; The songs themselves are catchy and delivered with enthusiasm. But a just warning, they become repetitive, to say nothing about how a song suddenly cuts in a row with such ferocity to give you a cervical boost.

That said, the myriad of maneuvers of the intrigue and Herky Jerky musicality of the play make it all delightfully surreal, as if Alejandro Jodorowsky decided to adapt “Joseph and the incredible Dreamcoat Technicolor”. It is light and more than a little confusing, but understands that the appropriate fable concerns more narrative than history.

Similar to “I am Frankelda”, “Cielo” (“Heaven”) by Alberto Sciamma displays a similar young girl between the heights of the imagination and the deaf noise of reality. Here, the setting is Bolivia, while we testify in the first minutes of Santa Claus of eight years (Fernanda Gutiérrez Arannda) capturing a fish in the river and the whole swallow. From there, she strikes her father’s head with a rock, stab her mother in her stomach, catches another fish for “company” and stands out in the Bolivian desert with her mother in a barrel filled with salt.

It is a properly sinister opening, but has lifted by the contrasting penis of the performance of Aranda while it trembles along the campaign on foot, by truck and by bus. It is a mission of peace: Santa Claus without reservation believes that heaven is, well, a place on earth, and when they arrive, they will bring his mother back to life (we learn, in a curious strain of magic realism, that Santa Claus has this capacity, especially given the fish that she claims in her). Along the way, she Meet several figures whose attitudes are modified by his presence: a disillusioned priest (Luis Bredow), a group of women fighters Called cholitasand a skeptical police captain (Fernando Arze Echalar), whose own losses bind him to Santa Claus and offer them the potential to heal.

Sciamma and the director of photography Alex Metcalfe beautifully capture the brilliant blue and the narcotic nocturnal landscapes of the Bolivian countryside, including a bus late bus, but the real special effect is naturalistic performance with a wide -wide eyes, full of remarkable determination and vulnerability. Her Santa Claus is, seen through certain goals, desperately naive on the power of magic. And yet, it is precisely this intimate belief that has an impact on the non-believers she meets. It is comforting, even in the Hazine of its ambiguous end, a deeply sincere fantastic drama which can shoot the firmest the firmer.