Mexican stop-motion short Dolores goes online: corn-husk tomb figures and a week-long 360-degree shot

Cecilia Andalón Delgadillo's debut short Dolores, a dialogue-free Mexican stop-motion film, went online for Halloween on Miyu Distribution's BANG BANG YouTube channel after more than 80 festival selections and a 2025 Ariel Award nomination. A seven-year-old girl escaping a fire demon falls into an ancient grave, where two sinister figures wrapped in corn husks want her to stay, and a resourceful armadillo offers a way out. The design draws on western Mexico's pre-Hispanic heritage: the tomb figures borrow calavera imagery and keep the corn husks from the field above, and the armadillo connects to the region's shaft tombs (tumbas de tiro) and to a death-related deity.

Production ran two and a half years from the decision to make the film to the final master. Much of it happened at El Taller del Chucho in Guadalajara, where Andalón Delgadillo had worked on Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio; she first asked studio director Angélica Lares for feedback on her screenplay and then returned with a co-production proposal. Art director Mario González helped develop the characters' look; the puppets were built by Andalón Delgadillo and Puebla-based artist Ángel Meléndez; Gilberto Torres, also from the Pinocchio crew, was cinematographer.

Two shots show how the crew used the method. Animator Pablo Bedolla spent a week on a 360-degree camera move circling Dolores and the two skeletal figures, on a set built specifically for that shot. Animator Nabí Orozco made the armadillo's transformation in clay by working backward. Elsewhere the camera is often deliberately static, which the director links to her theatre puppet and mask work; she names Jan Švankmajer as a major influence.