Film Show 070: Cristóbal León & Joaquín Cociña

Cristóbal León (b. 1980) and Joaquín Cociña (b. 1980) are Chilean visual artists and filmmakers best known for their 2018 film The Wolf House (aka La Casa Lobo), one of the best and most haunting animated films of the 21st century. Since then, the two have created numerous short films, features, and music videos that have extended beyond animation: The Bones (2021) draws on the early cinema of Georges Méliès, The Hyperboreans (2024) is a highly meta film featuring puppetry, and their newest feature, the playful Donkey Princess (2026), is inspired by the music videos they loved as teenagers, from artists like Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, and Chris Cunningham. Donkey Princess premiered at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, and Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with León and Cociña shortly before its premiere on August 4th, 2026 via Zoom. They discussed formative childhood experiences, their love for early cinema and amateurism, and how MTV inspired Donkey Princess.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: I know both of you met at university when you were making your first short film, Lucía (2007). I’m curious how you two became interested in art. Were there any formative experiences you had in your childhood with music or film or visual art?

Joaquín Cociña: We were both born in 1980 in the middle of a dictatorship. In my case, it didn’t affect me directly, at least in the sense that nobody in my family was murdered, but my father and mother are left wing so it wasn’t the easiest time for them. My first nine years were a happy nine years, but it was a little grey given this context. My first political memories are of going to a manifestación [protest], and this is because 1988 was a turning point—there were elections to get rid of the dictatorship.

Cristóbal León: I think Joshua was asking about artistic experiences.

Joaquín Cociña: I know, but I wanted to start by saying this.

Cristóbal León: Ah, so you see Pinochet as an artist (laughter). For me, my family spent a lot of time working with their hands. My father would always paint or draw or build wooden furniture. He’d carve sculptures. My older brother was seven years older than me and he was my role model. I wanted to imitate everything he was doing, and he was drawing all the time. During my childhood and teenage years, I read a lot of comics. I was mostly reading Chilean comics—there was this Tintin-esque comic I loved called Mampato and Ogú, and it was an early aesthetic experience that really blew my mind. I remember thinking it was so intense and that I needed more of it.

When I was a teenager, I was reading US comics—I was into the darker stuff like Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Swamp Thing, The Sandman. I’m still a fan of Neil Gaiman and the whole Sandman series. It was a lot harder to get comics back then; there were only two comic book stores in Santiago, and Santiago’s a big city. I would get anything and read it. My family was not particularly artistic in the sense of belonging to the art world. Joaquín’s father, though, is a poet who is part of Chile’s literary world, but I didn’t have any connection to these scenes. I was drawing and making crafts, though, and this was always part of my environment.

Joaquín Cociña: My father was a poet and, in the 1980s, the avant-garde poetry and avant-garde visual arts scenes were really connected. Less so in the 1990s, but it was still there. Because of this, I had some idea of visual arts and poetry, and I wanted to be a poet and a painter when I was a teenager. I became a painter when I was 14 or 15, and it sounds ridiculous, but I was painting more then than I do now. I was painting with acrylic paints and making expressionist paintings of my girlfriend naked—the sort of things that painters do when they’re 80 years old (laughter).

So I already felt like an artist before I went to art school. Art school hit me in the opposite way—for two years I was really confused, though my brain eventually got organized. Before that, literature was a huge thing for me. It’s funny because when I was a kid, the process of learning to read and write was difficult because I was immature, but everything changed when I became a teenager. I was reading Henry Miller novels, Baudelaire, Bukowski. I was really into the real-life diary thing. Simone de Beauvoir. Later I discovered Marcel Proust, and it was a huge thing for me. I remember taking my time to read through the seven books [of In Search of Lost Time] because I knew it’d end at some point. He was so funny.

In the 1980s, the local production of art was really low because of the dictatorship, and the country wasn’t really open to the world. The 1990s is when everything came in from the United States: cartoons and comic books and records. When I was a kid, I spent a lot of hours watching cartoons on TV. It was a lot of Japanese anime, as well as some North American stuff. Also as a teenager, I started going to these two specific cinemas in Santiago, one of which is still around. I was just in love with David Lynch, Bergman, Tarkovsky. I became an arty film guy. I think our new movie, Donkey Princess (2026), is about our connection to music videos and cinema from those years.

Was there a point at which you made the decision to be an artist?

Joaquín Cociña: I spent the last two years of high school just waiting for that shit to be over (laughter). I knew I just wanted to go to art school, and I knew that it’d be my life. I’d like to think that if I were young now, I’d just quit school and pursue art, but at the time it seemed impossible, like you’d die if you tried that.

Cristóbal León: I knew that my life had to be about art when I was a teenager, but I wasn’t sure how to do it. I didn’t have connections with galleries, I didn’t know anyone who studied art, and my parents never took me to museums. I didn’t have any references for how to do this—it was so abstract and obscure. Architecture was the closest thing I had in my life. I ended up studying design and while doing this, I discovered the art school that was on the same campus. I ended up studying the two things at the same time. When I finished, I started working at an animation studio that focused on motion graphics. That was when I really decided to do this. There was something inside of me that needed to be out in the world. I knew I couldn’t have a boss, that this couldn’t be my life, and I knew if I didn’t do this that I would die. I applied for a scholarship to study in Europe.

Joaquín Cociña: This was around the time we started working together. You were really energetic about it. This reminds me of a story, and I’m sorry because it’s a little bit personal, but I remember that my father took me to a gallery in Santiago. This was in a rich area of the city. There was this small art show of Francis Bacon’s works. It was mostly prints but there were one or two paintings. I was a teenager then, and I remember getting a really strong erection. We went back in the car with my father and my hands were shaking—I was really impacted by it. So yeah, I felt it’d be important to have more erections like that in my life.

Erections?

Joaquín Cociña: Yes, erections. Like my penis (laughter). It was a funny afternoon.

Do you guys remember the first—

Joaquín Cociña: Erection? (laughter).

The first impression that you guys had of each other when you met in the late 2000s.

Joaquín Cociña: Well, it wasn’t what I just said (laughter).

Cristóbal León: We kind of knew each other because we had some friends in common. I wouldn’t say that it’s very different from the impression I have now.

Joaquín Cociña: At the time, I was a good example of an art student in the most boring sense. I would swallow whatever visual art was presented to me and I would talk like a visual artist, which in Santiago meant that you’d sound smart but weren’t actually smart (laughter). That’s the sort of guy I was for two years before I worked with Cristóbal, and I remember that he was different—he had a different perspective. He was like a lone rider in the way he thought about art. And that’s why we worked together—it felt fresh. Cristóbal knew more about animation than me. For me, it was like discovering a completely new field. I remember after work one day, I met my girlfriend and told her that I had no fucking clue what we were doing and that it felt great. She saw the first cut of Lucía and said, “Oh, you’re going to be famous.”

Cristóbal León: I knew Joaquín’s work from art school. I saw them at exhibitions and I liked them, and I had this strong intuition that we could make something good together. I don’t know why it didn’t happen with other artists, but I felt a strong connection with his drawings and felt we could do something good. I approached him and asked to make an animation together, and I wasn’t surprised that it worked out well. Joaquín is right, though, that we didn’t know what we were doing. It was very confusing when we were producing the first works—we felt dizzy, like we were inhabiting an abyss. It was a good feeling though, and I sometimes miss it. There was a sense of artistic risk, of being in the wild.

Since you two have been working for a couple decades now, do you feel like there are things that you’re able to bring into your projects that the other person can’t, and vice versa? Are you generally fulfilling different roles, or filling in certain gaps?

Cristóbal León: I don’t feel like I can bring something into this world that Joaquín can’t. Not in any deep sense.

Joaquín Cociña: There’s some technical stuff that Cristóbal can do that I can’t.

Cristóbal León: And the other way around, especially with drawing. But I wouldn’t say it’s essential. Our collaboration is more about the chemistry we have and the way we push boundaries.

Joaquín Cociña: We had an art show in Santiago a few months ago and it featured drawings from our sketchbooks. Most of the drawings were in separate notebooks since we lead these separate lives, and for both of us, our sketchbooks aren’t sacred. Even in that situation, it’s funny that we didn’t sign every single drawing. We’re working on a new project right now called Hansel or Gretel and because of some daily life issues, I made most of the drawings for the storyboard. But that doesn’t mean those drawings are mine—they’re our drawings. And it’s the same when Cristóbal draws stuff too. So it’s not about two artists working together anymore. It’s more like a theater company.

With The Hyperboreans (2024), there was a deliberate decision to not make another full animated feature like The Wolf House (2018). I’m curious how you guys make decisions on, for example, the screenplay or in directing actors or in the puppetry that appears in The Hyperboreans. What does that look like?

Cristóbal León: We talk a lot. We’ll have discussions and, in general, we’ll spend a lot of time just defining things. There will be a set of rules or specific aesthetic visual frames, and then we play within those borders. This is something that’s become increasingly true over the years. We don’t control each other; we invite each other and others to play in this field, letting things happen within the rules we define. It’s more or less like that now. I remember when we started animating The Wolf House, we had this really stupid rule that the two of us had to be present for the animation process, so we couldn’t animate separately. Both of us had to be on set. We quickly removed that rule because we realized that we work much better when we’re not watching each other. In the moment you might think that what the other person is doing is wrong, but then they’ll finish and it’ll turn out even better than you expected. It was a learning process to give people space.

Joaquín Cociña: I don’t feel like negotiating with Cristóbal. If that’s happening, then we’re not on the right path. When Cristóbal comes to me with something I don’t understand, I try to understand it. If I still don’t understand, we just quit the idea. And the same is true the other way around. But generally, we give space to try things. For Donkey Princess, we tried to put a limit on what we could use for the backgrounds because it was getting really confusing. At one point we said that it would only be small-scale stuff, so it could be a drawing or shots of a detail of a garden. And that rule made everything clear. We try to understand the aesthetics of the film in both abstract and concrete ways. And as Cristóbal pointed out, we’re just playing.

Cristóbal León: If I don’t feel like I have this sense of play, whether we’re writing or using After Effects, then I’m not happy with the process.

With Donkey Princess, what were you trying to do to make sure you had this sense of play? This is a really playful film—even the fairy tale framing helps with that. There’s a point in the movie where they go to the video store too and there’s the Ghostbusters (1984) sequence. There’s an obvious love for movies here that feels childlike. What sort of things were you doing concretely on set to make sure it felt like play?

Cristóbal León: We had about five weeks of shooting but a long pre-production and a long post-production. During those pre- and post-production times, we played a lot, experimenting with things—drawings, models, miniatures, animation techniques. The most difficult period to allow for play is the actual shooting. For this film it was the most proper shoot we’ve ever had—50 or 60 people, really organized departments—and that was really difficult for me. The production designer or the art director wouldn’t like that we’d go and make things with our own hands. It’s like you enter this military organization and you’re not allowed to enter the other departments (laughter), and it’s really difficult for me because we’ve made a career of doing everything ourselves.

Joaquín Cociña: And in the wrong way!

Cristóbal León: And then we’re suddenly exiled from these other departments.

Joaquín Cociña: This image just came to mind that might help us with the next shoot. When we’re in pre- or post-production, we can imagine that we’re kids playing soccer or basketball and having fun. And when we’re shooting, it’s like we’re rich spoiled kids, like, (in a whiny, demanding voice) “I need this puppet now!” And then someone comes and you say, “And move that here!” (laughter). But yeah, it’s hard. I agree with Cristóbal because our pre-production design was so strange that the production was really specific—all the technical stuff was really weird. It was really hard to do reverse shots because we had the screen backwards, and instead of moving the camera, you had to move the world we made, all the lights, change the background. And that decision was really strange—it was a pre-production design decision we made, and that changed a lot during shooting. But yeah, we were playing the game we designed.

For The Wolf House you had these workshops that you set up and you wanted to frame the creation of the film in that way. And there were workshops for The Hyperboreans too. How did it compare with this new film and the more typical professional process?

Cristóbal León: We do two things. We open the process up and exhibit that, and then we do workshops with students who are asked to build the scenography. We realized that we’re more interested in processes than the final result. Our first short film is about sculptural and drawing processes, and The Wolf House is also partly a document of the making and destruction of sculptures and paintings. To focus on the process is the most important thing, and the most exaggerated version of that is making an art show about making a film. Ever since we started making short films, we thought that the set we had could be more interesting than the final result. And at some point we really decided to do that—to show it as an art piece. But also, the other benefit I can see is that it provides a sort of relief. If the film doesn’t exist or it’s a very bad film, we at least still had a really good show (laughter). There’s less of a burden that way; maybe the film isn’t going to be significant, but at least there was something.

Joaquín, you mentioned earlier that you were inspired by music videos you watched when you were younger. And you two have made music videos yourselves for artists like PJ Harvey, The Smile, and Camila Moreno. What music videos were you guys drawn to?

Joaquín Cociña: First off, I’ll say it was all of Michel Gondry’s work in the ’90s. Actually, the one world that Diana discovers in the film is maybe too close to Gondry, and we were worried about that but decided to just stick with it. I also liked Spike Jonze. And then Radiohead’s music videos. I remember watching the one for “Paranoid Android” and having no idea what I was looking at. I didn’t really like Radiohead before that—I didn’t like Pablo Honey (1993)—but the animation in that clip was exciting.

Cristóbal León: This was a time when MTV came to Chile, y’know? Everyone had it in their homes in the late ’90s and early 2000s. That interzone between animation and live action and early VFX with people like Chris Cunningham and Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry was very influential to our artistic education. With Gondry, I feel like his music videos are still underrated. Obviously they’re recognized and recognizable but they’re so important and influential. For me, the video for Björk’s “Bachelorette” is a masterpiece. It was so influential for The Hyperboreans and this film. He’s a great artist, and I think the fact he was doing commissions means that he’s not given the attention he deserves; he’s one of the biggest artists of our time.

What do you think you specifically learned from these music videos?

Joaquín Cociña: Gondry is a machine of ideas. He doesn’t really have a style, which is really weird. Most artists have a particular style. They paint with specific colors, they use certain materials. But with Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze, it felt like every music video was a new idea. It’s really amazing. And I felt that approach was really similar to Méliès, actually, and other early cinema. I remember watching MTV and thinking that people were transforming the rules of how we watched things, and I felt the same way about the other programming too.

Can you talk to me about your interest in early cinema? It’s really obvious when you watch The Bones (2021), but I’m curious if you could speak to how it specifically impacted Donkey Princess.

Cristóbal León: I’ll start with the most obvious thing, which is that it’s really theatrical. The fact we were shooting with a projected background made everything look more theatrical. When we realized that we’d shoot it in that way, we thought it’d be reminiscent of that era of cinema. Until the end of the film, when we land in the real world, the camera is almost always on a tripod. It’s still.

Joaquín Cociña: During COVID, I was teaching at an art school. I was the teacher for the first year of a workshop, and it was a really confusing time to teach. I invited Niles Atallah, a filmmaker with whom we made the first three short films [Lucía, Nocturno de Chile (2008), and Luis (2008)]. I invited him to teach a class on montage, and he decided to make a presentation on early cinema and montage. The presentation was amazing. At the end of that lecture I thought, I just shouldn’t film anymore (laughter). Like, these guys were making such good stuff a century ago. And there’s something that happens when you have access to this new technique… there are so many ideas and dreams and solutions. Like, the first 3D renders that existed in the 1970s are amazing; all those early animations were great. So for me, what’s really inspiring is what’s happening at the beginning of a turning point. Later, there are standards and people know what they’re doing.

Cristóbal León: Maybe the most important thing about the inspiration we take from these filmmakers is what Joaquín is saying. Film grammar wasn’t really developed yet. We come from the contemporary art world and neither of us studied film, so we don’t actually know the rules. We’re learning them now, sadly (laughter). And we have to invent rules for every film we make. It’s like an alien vision towards cinema. I think it’s something we really love. And we’re doing it now for the new film we’re making, Hansel or Gretel. To create a new grammar for every film is maybe the thing we enjoy most. I think it’s so boring to simply adopt preexisting languages. And in a way, I feel what we’re doing is a bit anticolonial. We’re not making films in Hollywood; we’re digesting these films and giving back something that’s distorted.

Joaquín Cociña: I like a lot of North American productions and cinema. Here in South America, a lot of people in film speak against all that, but it’s not the case for us. Donkey Princess is about North American films; we’re trying to be honest about our film education. Like, I love some European films, but my roots are really in North American films. With that said, I get really tired of watching, for example, Netflix. It feels like I’m watching the same film every time. They all look the same, even the actors look the same. Something I like about mainstream Korean films, for example, is that at least the acting is different—they’re over the top. But yeah, because of our lack of education, we’re trying to play with the rules. There are still some rules that are really strange for me. People would say we would have to do certain things while shooting because it’d be a problem otherwise, but for me it’s like, I don’t care (laughter). I do understand things more now, sadly, as Cristóbal said.

You’re talking about learning things, but I’m curious if there are things you’ve had to unlearn over the course of your careers to make sure you’re still following this ethos.

Joaquín Cociña: We were shooting this film as if we were in the ’40s. We had all these stages set up and it was absurd. When we moved to shooting in the real world and in apartments, it felt so easy. The walls were already there! The art department arrives the day before and everything would be ready. The trees are real so we didn’t have to create that.

Cristóbal León: For the next film, I think we’re going to fight for more of our own standards, both with the artistic side of things and the production side. This guy who used to coach the national football team in Chile used to talk a lot about amateurism. He would praise the amateur quality of players, and I miss that sometimes in the crew, you know? I hate professionals (laughter). I hate to feel that people are just there to do their job. This sounds ridiculous because it is, but making art is sacred and deep and meaningful. I don’t care if people do things wrong, but I don’t like it when people just do their jobs as if it’s another day in the office. It doesn’t affect the final result, but it changes the process.

The next film is called Hansel or Gretel and not Hansel and Gretel?

Joaquín Cociña: Yeah, it’s based on Hansel and Gretel but Cristóbal pointed out that it’d be a Google nightmare to call it that (laughter). I think it’s funny to call it that, and right now the film is about the fluidity of identities, about the confusion of the self. It’s a coming-of-age film.

When I interview multiple artists at the same time, I end my interview with the same question and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about the other person?

Cristóbal León: There are many things. Joaquín is like a brother. If I had to say one thing, it’s his connection to drawing and materials in general. It’s something I’m continuously surprised by. There’s something magical about how he can be completely in the present when he’s drawing. It’s really special.

Joaquín Cociña: I’ll say that it’s also hard to choose one thing. I like Cristóbal’s tendency to push the boundaries of what we do. He makes sure that we’re not lazy, that we’re not stuck with one technique or approach. He always wants to try things out, and in our studio it feels like the rule is “let’s try it,” and that’s something that he’s really pushing for. It’s a really experimental approach. And it’s good that he’s a bit of a workaholic because that means there’s always something to do.

Cristóbal León & Joaquín Cociña’s newest feature film, Donkey Princess, premiered at this year’s Locarno Film Festival.

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