Welcome! Glad you could join us for another Sunday issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Here’s the plan today:

• 1) Saving a forgotten Mexican movie.

• 2) More about an exciting Nigerian–South African project.

• 3) Animation newsbits.

With that, let’s go!

A movie appeared in 1983, in Mexico City. It was something rare for its time: an animated feature created in Mexico. Back then, only two others existed. The title was Roy del espacio — in English, Roy from Space. And almost no one went to see it.

“The movie was a complete flop. It was ignored,” says Alejandro Vidal Charris, a film scholar from Colombia. After opening in a dozen theaters, it screened for about a week. Then it was gone: “it just vanished,” Charris says.

Roy from Space wasn’t only a commercial dud. It became a bit infamous. An “absolute disaster,” one viewer called it. The film was amateurish, sloppy, strange. Most of its animators were young outsiders to the medium. Its director was older and had a career in film (he did titles), but he didn’t know how to make an animated feature.

Sometimes, movies in this vein turn into cult phenomena. But Roy from Space never had that second chance. When it disappeared, it really disappeared. It got categorized as a lost film: the third Mexican animated feature was no more.

That was the story, anyway, when Charris started poking around in early 2021. The pandemic was raging and he needed to pass the time. “Everybody was bored in their houses,” he says, “so, out of boredom, I started to Google about lost media.”

He came across that odd name, Roy from Space, and the mystery and the bad word-of-mouth. “I got intrigued, honestly,” he admits. Asking online, he learned that a few Mexican books contained details about the film. A historian who’d written one of the best accounts was “a little bit flabbergasted when I told him I was trying to research Roy del espacio,” notes Charris. His contact felt that the film wasn’t worth the effort.

“I mean, that’s his opinion,” Charris says now.

Eventually, a separate contact in Mexico connected him to the Cineteca Nacional — the state film archive. Charris was looking for the film, the rightsholders, any information whatsoever. “And they told me, ‘We have the negatives here,’ ” he remembers. The lost movie wasn’t lost after all.

That was in 2021. He wouldn’t get to see Roy from Space in motion for several years. Thanks to his research, though, a re-release is in the works. The film will have its second chance — more than four decades later.

Roy from Space is a midnight movie. Having watched part of it ourselves, no other label fits. Just on the visual side, the drawings aren’t assured and the animation is accidentally surreal — it was rotoscoped, but in a haphazard way. The film is outsider art with a totally, charmingly homemade feel. Which makes it fascinating.

Roy is an astronaut on a mission to Mars. The planet’s ruler is an evil space-king whose robot minions call to mind Moltar from Space Ghost. Elements of the ‘30s Flash Gordon serials show up, too, since the animators used them as raw material for the rotoscoping. Yet what they made is hard to call derivative. It’s all been transformed into something one-of-one, and bizarre.

When Charris finally saw Roy from Space, he already knew most of these specifics. He’d become the leading expert on the film, and written the paper on it. Over time, he’d located the relatives of its director and producer — including people who’d worked on the project. The only missing piece was Roy itself.

That changed in late 2024, after the negative got scanned. He could watch a few minutes at last. “These three years of research have come down to this,” he remembers thinking. “And it was amazing.”

Charris, though, wasn’t involved in scanning the film. He came to Roy from Space slightly as an outsider himself — until he started digging around, film scholarship and preservation weren’t his fields. “I have a degree in international relations, I have experience writing academic papers,” he says, “but nothing related to cinema.”

Luckily, he didn’t need to handle the negative. As it turned out, a couple of other people were on the trail of Roy from Space, too.

An American distributor called Deaf Crocodile had gotten curious about it. (Full disclosure: we’ve worked on a few Deaf Crocodile releases this year.) Its co-founder, Dennis Bartok, tells us that the promise of “wild and surreal sci-fi” was intriguing — as was the total lack of “existing footage or even a trailer.”

But the company couldn’t reach Roy from Space’s rightsholders. They didn’t get their lead until Charris emailed them in early 2023. He was looking for a distributor that might do something with Roy, and Deaf Crocodile was on his list. “That very day, they replied to me,” he says.

Negotiations with the rightsholders began in early 2024 and lasted for months. On the other side was Andrea Pérez Mata — daughter of Roy from Space’s producer, and an artist on the film. The unique circumstances around Roy meant that the distributor had to sign a deal before watching what it was buying.

Craig Rogers (co-founder of Deaf Crocodile) was uncertain. Bartok insisted. “If we don’t do it,” he said, “no one else will — and it’s called Roy from Space; we have to do it just because of the title alone!”

Buried in the Cineteca Nacional, Roy from Space had aged surprisingly well. “Incredibly,” Craig Rogers tells us, “this film that hasn’t been seen outside of its minuscule initial theatrical release still had the 35 mm original camera negative and audio in excellent condition.”

It was a happy turn in a sad story. Barely anything else from the film survives.

Director Héctor López Carmona spent three years on Roy from Space. It was a passion project, done partly with homemade equipment. The funding came from an industry friend — an exploitation producer — who backed the film on a “whim,” Charris says. Many on its team were related to each other, and most were absolute beginners. Andrea Pérez Mata was around 15 at the time.

Carmona’s hope was to make an “uplifting” film with his amateur crew. The work was exciting. “If you ask the people involved, they will tell you that they had a lot of fun,” says Charris. And then came that opening in Mexico City.

Roy’s failure crushed Carmona. He grew depressed and sick, and he passed away due to health problems a couple of years later. “If you want me to get dramatic, this movie killed its director. Because he lost his biggest dream,” Charris explains. Carmona’s widow eventually got rid of the production materials — the cels, the custom rotoscoping setup. They landed in a dump truck, tossed out a window.

But Carmona’s dream lived on through the negative. When the Deaf Crocodile guys watched the scan, they were thrilled — this thing was actually real, and “strange and wonderful and utterly otherworldly,” in Bartok’s words. Even so, a problem remained. It was unreleasable.

Between four and five minutes of Roy from Space take place in live action. It was Bartok who noticed that these shots, mostly of explosions and spaceships, weren’t original. They’d been stolen from a Japanese film called Message from Space (1978) — spliced directly into Roy’s negative. As Rogers puts it:

When Dennis instantly recognized the live-action footage, I realized there was no way we’d be able to release the film with that footage still in it. Our first thought, given the film’s low-budget aesthetic already, was to replace [it] with static cards similar to the “shot missing” cards used in the Tarantino–Rodriguez Grindhouse films. That would certainly be the easiest and cheapest way of getting around it — but we don’t typically do things the easiest or cheapest way. So, then we thought, “What if we created new animation to replace all that live-action footage?”

It was an unusual move, but there wasn’t much of an option. “Roy from Space is unique in that the footage from Message from Space was clearly cut in without permission,” Bartok tells us, “and honestly it would be next to impossible to clear it for use.”

The scenes would have to be replaced.

Through a friend, Deaf Crocodile linked up with two Los Angeles animators who work in a lo-fi, DIY style that suits Roy.

Their names are Brian Smee and Isabelle Aspin — known for great things like the music video Across My Jaw. Quickly, they became Roy from Space converts. “I can’t really think of something else quite like it, that feels like people learning how to make a movie on the spot, basically,” Aspin says.

“We keep talking about how it’s, like, a testament to the power of animation,” Smee tells us. In his words:

It has this reputation of being... not great. So many things about it, before you even see it, tell you, “Stay away. This isn’t worth your time.” But then, when you watch it, you’re just, like, “Oh, my God. This is incredible. It’s amazing.”

Since the start of 2025, they’ve been transforming those four or five minutes of Roy into animation. Early on, they hit a dead end when they tried to rotoscope the stolen footage: the results didn’t quite match the rest of the film. A tip from a friend changed their thinking. Smee again:

[They] said the footage that we’re replacing is basically like an unfinished animatic. It’s almost like inserts. Like, ‘When we have time, we’ll animate this shot.’ But it just felt like they, maybe, ran out of time and resources. So, we’re picking it up for them and trying to finish it as faithfully as possible.

Rotoscoping was out. Using the same film grammar and style as the rest of Roy from Space, they’re creating original animation to take the place of the stolen shots. They feel like they’re in dialogue with the film’s creators in the past, Aspin notes — just as the film’s creators were in dialogue with those Flash Gordon serials.

This project demands physical background paintings, plastic cels and cutouts. Many shots are drawn directly on cel, frame by frame. Surfaces get dirty and smeared, which shows up on screen. And, at one point, Aspin and Smee “zoomed” into a cutout planet by stacking Scrabble tiles under it, bringing it closer to the camera.

The old equipment — cels and the paint designed for them — isn’t as abundant as it once was. Aspin and Smee have an aging cache of cel paint from Cartoon Color (once-essential stuff) that used to belong to someone else, which they’re mixing with a lower-quality cel paint made today. Their source for cels is an online store that’s “definitely just a guy’s garage in Temecula, and he’s just got a backlog of all this stuff,” Aspin says.

It’s necessary for the throwback look. “It would be great,” Smee notes, “if someone watched this and had no idea that what we made for it was made in 2025.”

Roy from Space is definitely no masterpiece — it’s notorious for a reason. Its flaws are part of its appeal, though. You can feel a homespun magic in it.

This team of untrained artists somehow saw the project through, even though just two animated features had been done in Mexico before. The previous ones were professional industry jobs; outsiders, somehow, made their own. About viewers seeing Roy today, Aspin says, “I hope they realize that they could probably make an animated film.”

“I really hope that people follow their passion projects after seeing Roy from Space,” Smee agrees. “Anything that they’ve been wanting to make, I hope they make it.”

The Deaf Crocodile guys are excited to revive this thing. And Alejandro Vidal Charris is pleased with the way everything’s gone. “I think it’s a very important cultural artifact of a specific time,” he says about Roy. “Even if it’s not perfect, it has its flaws, I think it deserves to be seen.”

Roy from Space could’ve stayed hidden inside the Cineteca Nacional. After all, as Charris points out, the film was really “never lost.” Its producer was successful in Mexico’s live-action industry; it was natural to preserve his projects. How many people were searching for Roy, though? It’d been sitting in there for decades. “I honestly think nobody bothered to ask,” Charris says.

It took a little curiosity, and the generous help of strangers online, for Charris to find it. He never visited the Cineteca himself — “I never set foot in Mexico; everything has been online,” he says. An enthusiast in Colombia saved a piece of Mexican film history, and a team in the States is bringing it back. Roy from Space was once a tiny, forgotten blip in a dozen theaters in Mexico City. Finally, it’s reaching the world.

Since the beginning of 2025, we’ve kept an eye on Crocodile Dance.

The project popped up quietly in an event schedule back in February. But we saw that Shofela Coker was attached, and we were interested. You may know his gorgeous work from Liyana — or from Kizazi Moto (2023), Disney’s anthology of African animation. With Crocodile Dance, he’s making a feature film, co-directed with Nadia Darries.

We spoke to them at length after the movie won a pitch award at the Annecy Festival this summer. A month later, they got a bigger pitch award in South Africa. A third victory came last month in the city of Lagos, where Coker was born. “Pitching Crocodile Dance in Nigeria felt right and necessary,” he tells us by email.

The project is moving, and early versions of the teaser went over well. “[A] couple of folks mentioned that they had not seen an African woman animated to that level of quality before,” Coker writes, “which made me elated and sad in the same space of thought.”

Currently, work on design and storyboards is underway, as are talks with studios and artists in Nigeria and South Africa. “Most excitingly, the team has grown to include folks who have helped us achieve a 30-second, fully animated teaser,” Coker adds. It looks great, and it premiered this week when Crocodile Dance hit Kickstarter.

The goal is development funding — specifically, for a three-minute animation test. It’s the proof of concept, which matters a lot for a movie like this one, made outside the Hollywood system. The test persuades investors and film funds that this thing can happen. Lucan in South Africa is set to animate it. Coker’s film in Kizazi Moto, Moremi, came from the same studio.

You can find the campaign page here. Right now, it’s doing well. The promise of Crocodile Dance is obvious — people have noticed it everywhere the film’s appeared. “Our momentum is good,” Coker tells us, “and we hope to hear of even more positive news to aid our efforts before the end of the year.”

• In Palestine, a screening of Hayao Miyazaki’s Future Boy Conan was reportedly held for children in Gaza. The Palestinian embassy in Japan shared footage from the event.

• In Mexico, I Am Frankelda is officially a hit. Last weekend was its third, and it passed 700,000 attendees and $2.31 million in revenue. It’s predicted to reach 50 million pesos ($2.72 million) and maybe as high as a million attendees. Data from its fourth weekend — the current one — should be available shortly.

• Speaking of Deaf Crocodile: it’s showcasing The Short Films of Yuri Norstein, a Blu-ray collection due in America next month.

• Voicemails from My Dad is a sweet, fun and very personal film that hit YouTube lately. An American animator, Gabby Cherney, premiered it last year.

• Also on YouTube (thanks to The New Yorker) is the Irish short Retirement Plan. One we’d love to see nominated for the Oscar this year.

• A new book came out in America — Mahabharata: Designs of Dharma. Behind it is Sanjay Patel, known for his long career at Pixar, and his animated series Ghee Happy.

• In China, a second season of Yao: Chinese Folktales is coming in January. The first one was major — and it led to the feature Nobody, which drew a ton of attention this year.

• Meanwhile, Infinity Castle had a $52.4 million opening weekend in China.

• In Japan, the scholar Seiji Kanoh unearthed a number of early screenplays by Isao Takahata — revealing things about the development of his style and sensibility.

• Last of all: a resource about animation from Czechoslovakia.

Until next time!