Jorge R. Gutiérrez is one of the two big Mexican names in global animation. The other one is his friend Guillermo del Toro. Gutiérrez is an animator, painter, voice actor, writer and director. Born in Mexico City, he was raised in Tijuana and trained in the US at CalArts.
He came to global attention in 2014 with The Book Of Life for 20th Century Fox, and he went on to write and direct the series Maya And Three Three for Netflx, and write the Emmy award-winning El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera for Nikelodeon.
His works are easily recognisable thanks to their exuberant Mexican iconography mixed with motifs from contemporary pop culture. Gutiérrez always works with his wife, the artist Sandra Equihua, responsible for the design of female characters.
Gutiérrez and his production company Mexopolis signed a global deal with Netflix. Under the deal, Gutiérrez will write, direct, and produce new animated films, series and interactive projects for the streamer.
You are based in Los Angeles but your work celebrates Mexican culture and is very obviously Mexican. How do you view Mexico from the US?
I left the country because in Mexico there were no resources to support the kind of projects I wanted to do, celebrating Mexico. It’s very ironic because I had to leave Mexico to do Mexican things. I believe that your country is your mother and the one who does not love his homeland does not love his mother. Growing up on the border [in Tijuana] helped me a lot. I wondered what would happen to Mexican culture when one comes to the U.S. and what would happen to Hollywood? One more thing is that you don’t appreciate your country so well until you get out of it. I didn’t know I was Mexican until I stopped living in Mexico.
In the last decade, the Mexican animation industry has expanded and there has been a growth in the number of animation schools. How do you believe it can progress further?
It’s magical what is going on in Mexico, isn’t it? Rather than everything being a theory, there is now a generation of teachers in the universities who have worked in the animation industry. Now students learn how to do things, not only at an artistic level but also at a commercial one.
On the one hand, having the US as a neighbour is very positive, but also very negative in the sense that talent usually leaves Mexico What helped a lot during Covid was this idea that you can stay in your country and work in other parts of the world, especially in animation.
In Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse there were 50 Mexicans working on the film and more than half in Mexico. Hollywood is turning its gaze towards Mexico and thinking, “If we send productions to Canada, India… and the whole planet, why can’t we send them to Mexico?
I’m interested in your work as a character designer. Alongside Sandra, you lavish a lot of time in this, and I don’t think that it always happens in animation.
My wife Sandra says I became a writer and director to protect our character’s designs. We worked in the industry for many years and watched how our designs got smashed. And when we see some art books of films, we always wonder why these wonderful designs didn’t make it into the film? It was because the directors of animation, lighting, modeling or rigging changed them, and usually the directors don’t design their characters. I started as a designer and writer. Those were my first two jobs.
What is the most complicated thing about a character’s design?
The secret we have is to create the characters as if they were sculptures in a museum. As a child I saw the sculptures, whether they were religious or those of Mesoamerica, and imagined that these were literally toys. And the magic of animation is watching these toys move and come alive and laugh and make you cry.
Where will your career as a director go now?
Now I’m going to the world of Mexican wrestling. I’m making a movie about a Mexican Chihuahua who is going to fight animals from all over the planet. Apart from that, and for the first time I’m doing a series not for children, which is a new world for me. It’s not announced yet and I’m developing both projects for Netflix, which will also be backing a kind of sequel to Maya And The Three, but set in a future period of time.
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