Puerto Rico's only stop-motion studio: how Acho Studio built Bad Bunny's frog Sapo Cancho in six weeks

Cartoon Brew's Jamie Lang profiled Acho Studio, which its founder Quique Rivera describes as the only professional stop-motion studio in Puerto Rico, on 10 March 2026. Rivera launched the company in 2017 as a small production outfit working alongside larger animation companies, then moved it home to Puerto Rico in late 2021 after about ten years in Los Angeles. At its peak the studio has run four stop-motion stages at once, and even on its largest jobs roughly 70 to 80 percent of the crew is local, with experienced animators brought in from ShadowMachine and from productions such as Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio and Wendell & Wild.

The occasion was its run of work for Bad Bunny. For the album project DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, Acho designed and built the frog character Sapo Cancho -- Bad Bunny's team wanted a character inspired by the Puerto Rican crested toad, and Rivera developed it from his own coquí-inspired design -- and animated it for the hybrid short film, which is on Bad Bunny's official YouTube channel. Rivera says the team had about a month and a half to design and build the character, animate three minutes of film and produce some twenty Spotify canvas animations. The frog later made a brief cameo in Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show. For the music video "KETU TeCRÉ", on which Cartoon Brew names Jhantony Oliveras as co-director, the studio built seven puppet characters and several sets, including a miniature replica of a Condado nightclub, with four animators working throughout; another company shot the live-action sequences.

The craft detail worth keeping is how the studio began. Rivera noticed silicone puppet heads on professional productions, went looking for silicone in Puerto Rico, bought construction silicone at a home-improvement store and worked out his own technique. SMDB's Wiki page on improvised and substitute materials now records it as a worked example of substituting for a supply chain a small studio does not have. Rivera says he has a few series and, he hopes, a feature in development.