Luis Gerardo Ponce Piñon grew up hearing stories about his great-grandmother and the Mexican Revolution from his father.
Those stories inspired Piñon’s new short film, “Chelita, Como Me Duele Quererte,” which played at this year’s SCAD AnimationFest in September. The film, which Piñon co-directed with fellow student Riley Quinn, centers around “adelitas,” or the female soldiers of the Mexican Revolution, and in particular a romance between one of the soldiers and a man back home.
Piñon didn’t always know he wanted to be an animator (when he was younger, he wanted to be a graphic designer), but he always loved movies, thanks in part to his father.
“I’ve always been a huge fan of animation, thanks to my dad,” Piñon said. “He was the one who introduced me to a lot of the films I liked growing up. He taught me a lot about how movies are made.”
This particular story had been percolating in Piñon’s head for years before “Chelita, Como Me Duele Quererte” came to fruition. In high school, he came up with an idea set during the Revolution about a baker trying to find his kidnapped wife and daughter (many women were kidnapped and forced to become soldiers). But it wasn’t until his sophomore year at SCAD that an unlikely inspiration gave him the idea of the film – the television show “WandaVision.”
Piñon liked how “WandaVision” recreated the look and feel of television throughout different decades.
“I thought it would be really cool for someone to do that with the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema, or Cine de Oro, which I grew up watching,” Piñon said.
The Golden Age of Mexican Cinema took place from the early 1930s to the late 60s, and is perhaps best known for the work of directors such as Luis Buñuel and Emilio Fernández, as well as actors like María Féliix, Pedro Infante, and Dolores del Río. The films of this age helped shape Mexico’s cultural identity through the country and abroad.
Piñon watched numerous films before getting to work on his own movie, but three in particular served as huge reference points for “Chelita, Como Me Duele Quererte.”: “Enamorada,” a 1946 film about a revolutionary (Pedro Armendáriz) who falls in love with his enemy’s daughter (María Félix); “María Candelaria,” a film also starring Armendáriz and Dolores del Río that also was the first Latin American film to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes International Film Festival; and “Los Tres Huastecos,” a 1948 comedy starring Pedro Infante as three identical triplets raised in three different Mexican villages.
Beyond the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema, Piñon was also deeply inspired by dance. Dance plays a huge part in the visual language of the film, as well as in the central relationship at the heart of the movie. The dancing sequences were the most difficult to animate, Piñon said, and also one of the reasons the film had to be made using two-dimensional animation. The fluidity of that style worked better for the movement of dancing.
“You can really tell that 2D animation is done by a human hand, because it’s not completely perfect,” Piñon said. “Specifically with the films that were used as reference for the style of the film, we really looked at a lot of 50s and 60s Disney animation.”
Piñon said he was drawn to movies such as 1961’s “One Hundred and One Dalmatians,” which has a looser, almost sketch-focused style of animation.
“I think it gives it a lot of life, and energy, and just a lot of charm,” he said.
