Gonzalo Cordova and Cinema Fantasma deliver a surreal, over-the-top telenovela comedy for Adult Swim that blends 1980s Ecuadorian fashion, culture, comedy, and guinea pigs; now streaming on YouTube.
One of animation’s superpowers is the ability to revie old ideas.It’s a timeless medium that exists outside of reality and, therefore, can recycle discarded ideas into something magical.
So, when Rachel Kinnard, costume designer and wife of filmmaker Gonzalo Cordova, discovered her mother-in-law’s fashion design sketches from many years past, she knew better than to let see them put back into storage.
“My mother studied fashion design in Panama in the 80s and I remember growing up just flipping through her portfolio of designs,” shares Cordova, known for producing the Adult Swim series as well as writing Prime Video’s and Max’s .
“Knowing my wife works in costumes, my mother really wanted to show her these designs and, when my wife saw them, she was like, ‘Gonzalo, you need to do something with these.This is like magic.’” And he did., now available on Adult Swim, is a stop-motion, women-centered telenovela comedy that follows Marioneta, a proud wealthy Spaniard living in 1980s Quito, Ecuador.Marioneta moves to the area to exploit the region’s guinea pig population and turn them into a lucrative business, but along the way encounters a diverse group of eccentric and ambitious women navigating the complicated worlds of love, family, and whether one should eat or adopt cuyes (guinea pigs).
Cordova’s series, produced by Cinema Fantasma, celebrates Ecuadorian culture, lesbian love and, of course, 80s Latin American fashion featuring designs by the filmmaker’s mother, Blanca Cordova. Enjoy the first episode: “I’ve shown my mom a bunch of it and she’s insanely proud and touched,” says Cordova.“She’s very personally happy her designs are there, but we’re also incredibly close and we both love that our close relationship is present in the show.” Cordova lived in Ecuador until age 6, returning as a teen.His in-country experiences, along with his mother’s fashion designs, proved a well of inspiration that Mexico City-based studio Cinema Fantasma drew from to craft the show’s settings, character designs and overall aesthetic. “Gonzalo gave us references from filmmakers like Pedro Almodóvar, but he also showed us pictures from his youth,” notes Roy Ambriz, co-founder of Cinema Fantasma with brother Arturo Ambriz.
They both directed on Cordova’s show.“Ana Coronilla, our production designer and art director, studied a lot of Ecuadorian buildings and hotels while Mireya Mendoza, our translator and voice director, helped us adapt dialogues.We also hired a consultant from Ecuador, Pancho Vinachi, to help us identify certain phrases from the region we can include and place them in the conversations where they would be said naturally.” He continues, “This show has a lot of different Latin American views and a lot of nuances, but this clash of views gives us something really authentic and new.
It’s not like any Latin American show you’ve seen before.” In addition to the cultural easter eggs and rich Spanish and Ecuadorian flavors that saturate the story, is also, as Arturo, puts it, “a really weird show” in all the right ways.Telenovelas, or Latin American soap dramas, are, like most soap operas, overly dramatic and a bit unhinged.So, – complete with sex during house fires and children pimping out their virgin mothers – has a lot of exasperated facial expressions, large character eyes to convey intense emotions, and very quick camera movements with sudden close-up shots. The close-ups are a fun artistic choice for a stop-motion film, as viewers get the chance to observe every skirt thread, hair follicle, plaster smudge, and gooey-eyed tear on the guinea pigs.
Textures are shown up close and sometimes, those close-up shots replace the stop-motion puppets with real human hands pouring drinks or writing names on blacklists. “I know what I imagined the show to be but what came out the other end was a hyper, more concentrated version of that,” says Cordova.“The weirdness was weirder, and the beauty was way more beautiful than anything I could have imagined.And a lot of it stemmed from the fact that we wanted to constantly remind people they were watching stop-motion.
Sometimes, you want people to forget the medium they're watching as they get into the show more.But we wanted to keep people’s attention on that.So, we added in real hands, which was just instinctually funny, but it also snaps people out of their trance to realize, ‘Wow, someone hand-animated this beautiful thing.’” While stop-motion focused Cinema Fantasma is no stranger to the strange, bizarre, and beautiful, Arturo says that his and Roy’s sensibilities had previously been honed on dark fantasy for projects like , a feature they worked on at the same time as Cordova’s series.
To create something grounded in the real world, but not too grounded in reality considering the cow-sized rodents and cut-throat drama, was a challenge. “It was definitely out of our comfort zone,” says Arturo.“But this show has so many flavors, so many ingredients that create that unique flavor, that it was really compelling to us.It’s a very weird show.
We still cannot believe that this show exists.But it’s been a dream come true.” Aside from talking Cordova out of using marionette puppets to produce the series, Adult Swim gave Cordova and Cinema Fantasma mostly free reign when it came to making into the creative stop-motion explosion it became. Creative freedom is something any filmmaker or animator lives for, but for Cinema Fantasma, they’ve been waiting for a chance to show their work on a major platform, and Adult Swim has given them that chance.Back in 2021, for an interview about Cinema Fantasma’s series, Arturo shared “Some say that doing animation in Mexico is like playing a video game in the extra hard mode.
We have one shot.If we are given the opportunity to make an animated series, we have to make the best animated series ever.Not even just for us, but also to open the gates for more animation that can be produced in Latin America.” is that series. “For the Mexican animation industry, is an important step,” says Roy.
“Everyone here in Latin America is really excited watching this show.They feel honestly represented and that’s a great achievement.We really hope this show helps the whole animation industry in Latin America because it’s a great community and there are a lot of amazing studios out here doing amazing work.
We hope other big networks like Adult Swim continue to give us more chances and more ways to continue telling our stories.” As for Cordova, this series has opened up a world of possibilities in his own method of storytelling. “I’ve felt like a kid being given an unlimited toy budget,” shares Cordova.“I kind of went crazy and kept asking the team to design more and more sets.I was addicted to being able to build a whole world.
Clearly, I’m in love with stop-motion now.I want to work in it for the rest of my life.” Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime.She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment.
Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
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