Chilean Stop-Motion Duo León and Cociña Unveil 'Donkey Princess' at Locarno

A princess ripped from a fairy-tale kingdom and dropped into contemporary Chile — that is the premise of Donkey Princess, the third feature from Chilean stop-motion directors Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña, which has premiered in the international competition at the Locarno Film Festival. Variety published its review of the film on 9 August 2026 (Variety).

León and Cociña wrote the script with novelist Alejandra Moffat, reprising the writing partnership behind their first feature, The Wolf House. The film draws its source material from a 17th-century Charles Perrault tale called Donkeyskin — a story about a princess who flees her father's court, here reimagined as a collision between fairy-tale logic and modern urban Chile (Variety).

Antonia Giesen, who appeared in the duo's second feature The Hyperboreans, stars as Princess Diana. Francisco Melo plays the King, Diana's father, and Andrew Bargsted plays Lalo, a commoner who becomes her love interest. Natalia Geisse served as production designer (Variety).

León and Cociña's stop-motion work has crossed borders before. The pair created a stop-motion interlude in Ari Aster's 2023 film Beau Is Afraid, giving American audiences a taste of their handmade, unsettling visual style. Their previous features — The Wolf House (2018) and The Hyperboreans (2025) — each toured the festival circuit and built a following among animation devotees.

Behind the camera, Donkey Princess was produced by León & Cociña Films and Globo Rojo Films in Chile, with co-production from France's Metonymie and Viking Film. Bendita Film Sales, a Chilean-based international sales agent, boarded the project ahead of Locarno to handle distribution rights outside the producing countries — the companies that connect finished films with distributors in each territory (Variety). The Hollywood Reporter exclusively premiered the film's trailer on 3 August 2026, days before the festival opening (The Hollywood Reporter).

For audiences who have not encountered León and Cociña's work, the draw is the technique itself. Stop-motion animation is built frame by frame, with physical puppets and sets moved in tiny increments between each photographed image. The result has a tactile, slightly uncanny quality that computer animation rarely matches — and the Chilean duo have made it their signature.