The Ultimate Midnight Movie, Reborn
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Rotoscoping
16 min read
The article discusses how Roy from Space was rotoscoped 'in a haphazard way' using Flash Gordon serials as raw material, creating its accidentally surreal animation style. Understanding this animation technique illuminates why the film looks the way it does.
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Message from Space
14 min read
The article reveals that 4-5 minutes of footage was stolen directly from this 1978 Japanese sci-fi film and spliced into Roy from Space's negative, creating a major legal obstacle for re-release. This Japanese Star Wars imitation has its own fascinating production history.
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Lost film
14 min read
Roy from Space was categorized as a lost film before the negatives were discovered at the Cineteca Nacional. The history and preservation challenges of lost films provides important context for understanding why rediscovering this movie matters to film scholars.
Welcome! Glad you could join us for another Sunday issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Here’s the plan today:
1) Saving a forgotten Mexican movie.
2) More about an exciting Nigerian–South African project.
3) Animation newsbits.
With that, let’s go!
1 – Unearthing Roy
A movie appeared in 1983, in Mexico City. It was something rare for its time: an animated feature created in Mexico. Back then, only two others existed. The title was Roy del espacio — in English, Roy from Space. And almost no one went to see it.
“The movie was a complete flop. It was ignored,” says Alejandro Vidal Charris, a film scholar from Colombia. After opening in a dozen theaters, it screened for about a week. Then it was gone: “it just vanished,” Charris says.1
Roy from Space wasn’t only a commercial dud. It became a bit infamous. An “absolute disaster,” one viewer called it.2 The film was amateurish, sloppy, strange. Most of its animators were young outsiders to the medium. Its director was older and had a career in film (he did titles), but he didn’t know how to make an animated feature.
Sometimes, movies in this vein turn into cult phenomena. But Roy from Space never had that second chance. When it disappeared, it really disappeared. It got categorized as a lost film: the third Mexican animated feature was no more.
That was the story, anyway, when Charris started poking around in early 2021. The pandemic was raging and he needed to pass the time. “Everybody was bored in their houses,” he says, “so, out of boredom, I started to Google about lost media.”
He came across that odd name, Roy from Space, and the mystery and the bad word-of-mouth. “I got intrigued, honestly,” he admits. Asking online, he learned that a few Mexican books contained details about the film. A historian who’d written one of the best accounts was “a little bit flabbergasted when I told him I was trying to research Roy del espacio,” notes Charris. His contact felt that the film wasn’t worth the effort.
“I mean, that’s his opinion,” Charris says now.
Eventually, a separate contact in Mexico connected him to the Cineteca Nacional — the state film archive. Charris was looking for the film, the rightsholders, any information whatsoever. “And they told me, ‘We have
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