“I Am Frankelda,” Netflix‘s latest animated film, is set in a vividly grotesque world of monsters, spirits, and ghouls. The protagonist, aspiring young horror author Francisca Imelda, creates an entire world of fantastic creatures called the Topus Terrenus, one that comes alive in a parallel dimension. When one of her characters, Prince Herneval, travels to the human world to help save the dimension from ruin, Francisca rechristens herself Frankelda and embarks on a journey of self-discovery. The film is Mexico’s first entirely stop-motion animated feature, and its world — which draws visual inspiration from Spanish surrealist art — is a lovingly handcrafted feast for the eyes.

The film comes from Arturo and Roy Ambriz, a brother team who founded the stop-motion animation studio Cinema Fantasma and have worked on TV projects like the Adult Swim series “Women Wearing Shoulder Pads.” The movie is part spinoff, part prequel to their Cartoon Network Latin America series “Frankelda’s Book of Spooks,” an anthology series that featured the title character as a host providing the framework for a variety of scary stories. The duo, who made their feature directorial debuts with “I Am Frankelda,” wanted to delve into the character’s story and create a film that explored the creative process.

“You don’t have to watch the series before watching the film; they are complementary, but they are not sequential,” Arturo told IndieWire. “So we wanted to do something for a new audience to discover this world, to get in the mind of this author, to understand where she comes from, and that most important part of this film aren’t her stories, but her experiences that make her thrive as a creative force.”

With the film out on Netflix now, IndieWire spoke to the Ambriz brothers about the difficult process funding the film, balancing terror with accessibility for kids, and how Guillermo del Toro mentored them as filmmakers.

IndieWire: This was an independently made film and Mexico’s first stop-motion film. How did you finance it?

Roy Ambriz: It was really difficult. Warner Brothers in Latin America invested almost 30 percent of the film, and the rest we had to find, and in order to find it, we [had] to get some loans and mortgage our family house. So it was really, really, really difficult and stressful, but we knew that nobody was going to give us our first chance, and that we had to find a chance by ourselves. So we decided to take the risk, and we are glad that we did, because everything that has happened with this film is absolutely magical and wonderful, and now being able to show it to the whole world is the dream that we have had since we were filmmaking students.

Stop motion is a famously time-intensive medium. What did the production process look like?

Arturo Ambriz: The whole process took us around three years and a half. Those were some tough years. We have around 20 animation units in our studio at the same time, so we were moving the puppets from one stage to the other one. “Oh, but we need this prop that is being animated here, and this animator is sick, so she won’t be coming today.” So we had to rearrange the calendar like five times each day. It was crazy in terms of administration, but it was really fun because they are monsters, and they are puppets, and they are colorful, and they are nice, so everything seems chaotic, but at the same time fascinating, because we’re doing something that hasn’t been done in the country.

The film has a very specific, ornate visual style. Where did you take inspiration while crafting this world?

Roy: We had inspirations in different elements for decoration of the world, the visual creation. We studied a lot of the engravings of Gustave Doré. He created these wonderful and big worlds. That was a great inspiration, but also paintings from Remedios Varo, from Leonora Carrington, helped us a lot. There’s also inspiration in the paintings of Klimt, like “The Kiss.” We also combined it with all the elements that we love, from musical theater, from museums, pieces that we love, from armors, from the Renaissance. We wanted to create a whole new culture, a new world that felt ancient.

One of the most interesting visual moments is in the “Prince of the Realm of Terrors” musical number, where the film transitions from stop-motion to a watercolor aesthetic.

Roy: It’s all painting. It was made all by hand. I think that there are 700 cells made in oil. It was achieved by a team directed by our art director, Anna Colonica. I think that the artist spent almost four months painting by hand, each one, but I think it’s one of the most iconic scenes from our film.

Were there any other sequences that proved particularly difficult to achieve during production?

Arturo: One of the first sequences, or probably the first, in which Francisca is a child, and she’s there with her mother, and the mother is painting. That scene was added last minute. It was actually added after it premiered in Guadalajara. It was created through the help of Guillermo del Toro. We wrapped up production, but we realized through his mentorship that we needed this extra scene to show the heart of the character, to show where she comes from, why she does what she does. So it took an enormous amount of work and almost no time to animate or to post-produce. We literally finished that scene like one day before exporting the final movie, so it’s a miracle that that scene is in the movie, and we think it’s one of the best ones.

How did you first connect with del Toro? How did he serve as a mentor to you?

Roy: We connected with him many years ago. Before we studied filmmaking, we sent him just a fan email showing the stuff that we were doing, some special effects makeup we did, and he liked it, and since then, he has been our mentor. He has been helping us throughout these years. We have been doing stop-motion animation for 14, almost 15, years now. He helped us with this film, specifically when he saw it finished. He helped us to find distribution in Mexico, then connect us with Netflix for international distribution, but we learned a lot from him about the rhythm of a film, the differences between doing a short film to feature film, how the emotion has to be the most important element.

This film mixes a lot of macabre elements together, but it’s still appropriate for kids. How do you find that balance? It’s definitely something that, had I seen it as a kid, I would have found legitimately scary.

Arturo: It’s a strange balance. We try to do the thing that we would have loved to watch. Sometimes kids understand things even in more profound ways than adults do. Sometimes reason is an obstacle, and movies are a great way of expressing feelings and expressing things that are hidden to the normal eye or to the adult eye, to the adult perception. My daughter is three years old, she loves monsters, she absolutely loves the film… She has watched it repeatedly, and she understands a lot more than I ever imagined. So I think that audience will say if their kids are ready to watch it or not, but it depends on everyone, and I think that sometimes you need to break the mold, and to make strange films. Strange films are still needed in this society, maybe even more so than when we were kids.

What did you want audiences to take away from Frankelda’s arc?

Roy: For us, the most important thing is that to inspire all the audiences, specifically the young ones, to speak out, to do their own stuff, to find their own voice, to take risks and achieve that artistic project, because usually when you want to do something different, there’s a lot of different people that want to stop you or say that it’s not good enough. All these people [are] why we created the film, because it’s inspired [by] the suffering that we faced trying to produce our films. There were a lot of people who told us that we were not good enough. We were never going to achieve our dreams to do our own films, or that they were really weird, so that’s why we created this character, and this movie is for them.

What are your next steps as creators? Do you want to do anything more with this character?

Arturo: We would definitely love to make a sequel of this film. It depends on the reception it gets, of course. In the meantime, we are already working on the next film. It’s called “Ballad of the Phoenix.” It’s a medieval adventure. It still has no distribution, but we got some funding to start, so we’re building the puppets, the sets, and we’re doing animation tests.

Roy: It’s a film about a young princess who has to train with her teacher, a phoenix, in alchemy, in order to understand what life is about, and to understand that alchemy is more valuable when you use it to help others rather than finding a way to live forever, so it’s really profound. It’s about when we think about life and death, about the balance. We sometimes say that it’s kind of what happens if you mix “Game of Thrones” with “The Muppets,” something like that. We’re really proud of the results that we are getting right now in the first animation test that we’re doing. It’s a lot bigger than “I Am Frankelda.” The sets are huge and are really gorgeous, and we really think that it’s going to be one of the best films that we can ever do. It’s a lot of fun for us to work in this new, fantastic world.

“I Am Frankelda” is now streaming on Netflix.