Dec 12, 2024

2025 Academy Award® Short Film Contenders: “Nube,” directed by Christian Arredondo and Diego Alonso Sanchez de la Barquera Estrada

Cartoon Brew spotlights an animated short film that has been nominated for the 2025 Academy Awards.

In this issue, we present “Nube” by Mexican filmmakers Christian Arredondo and Diego Alonso Sanchez de la Barquera Estrada. The short won the Ojo for Best Mexican Short Animation at the Morelia International Film Festival and qualified for the Academy Award.

After witnessing an old, dark stormy cloud raining and dying in sorrow, Noma, the white cloud, realizes that her daughter, Mixtli, the dark stormy cloud, is in danger of untimely rain. The two embark on a journey of self-discovery and learn the importance of every moment in Nube, a beautiful and moving story written in the clouds by the French production company Avec ou sans Vous and Hungary's CUB animation.

Cartoon Brew: “Nube” begins with the very death of the storm and introduces the main theme of the film: loss and how we deal with it as individuals. Diego Alonso Sanchez de la Barquera Estrada (“Estrada”): This shot was a complete challenge for us. We didn't even know how to draw it, and what made it even more difficult was the problem: This shot was an important shot to quickly show how this imaginary world works, and it had to be very clear. The shot starts on the ground, with lots of trees being violently blown away by the winds caused by this huge storm, showing the magnitude and scale of the sky's impact on us. The camera pans upward to take us into another world, the world of clouds, to tell the story from the perspective of the clouds. We had to plan several flat shots with depth and height. But most important of all was to tell the painful death of this old cloud.

Christian Arredondo: Without a doubt, it was one of the most difficult shots in the production. Because from the very conception stage of the video, we had no reference material for how the death of the storm should look like. On top of that, there were many things going on at the same time: special effects, perspective, camera movement, and so on. This shot was taken very late in the production, and I think it benefited from the experience gained in other shots. For example, all of the trees and moving vegetation were created with multiple layers and noisy grease pencil rigs, and the storm was animated with multiple layers and its own effects and lighting were depicted frame by frame. [Arredondo & Sanchez de la Barquera Estrada: “Nube” is a very personal story. When we were conceiving the film, we were trying to find something that we could both relate to on a deep level. Our only goal was to create something heartfelt and honest. We were friends, but around that time we began to open up to each other in a more vulnerable way and started talking about what we were experiencing in our personal lives. At that time, Diego had lost a close family member and was dealing with grief. In the process, we realized that this is something that Christian families have to go through as well. Different times, different ages, different outcomes, but the same struggle. It comes from our own experiences and emotions, and this is what brought us together. As we talked further about our personal experiences of losing loved ones, we connected with each other and eventually this little cloud provided a pathway to the idea of an early rainfall.

What did you learn through the making of this film, production-wise, filmmaking-wise, creative-wise, or thematically? I can say, in particular, that since I was in charge of art direction, before “Nube,” I didn't think I was capable of producing something like this, nor did I know how to use color like this. Nevertheless, perhaps the biggest lesson I have learned over the past three years is that, at first, I wanted to do something simple and easy for the sake of production efficiency. At some point, however, I accepted the idea that everything turned out to be more complex than expected and at the same time very beautiful. I now know that the short films and animations that excite me today need the freedom to incorporate whatever is necessary (not necessarily a lot) to make them deeply expressive.

Sanchez de la Barquera Estrada: For me, this was the first time I had presented such a deeply personal work. It was very vulnerable. My friends and co-directors have had similar experiences, and there are many people who have seen my short film and told me about their own experiences.

Arredondo: At first, we needed to keep the style simple so that the production would be easy. However, as we became immersed in the situation we were in and the speed at which we had to work, we eventually abandoned the reference and began to work in the personal way that each of us had done before going into production, creating high quality color scripts and solving other problems we had never faced before We began to adopt ways of working that would help us solve problems we had never faced before, such as creating high-quality color scripts. We are very proud that the final style of the film is not the style of any of us or any of our references.

Many of the elements that typify the film, such as textures, came from a set of brushes I was using in my personal process (created by me in Clip Studio Paint) that proved useful in properly representing elements such as rain. This is why the film is set in Mexico, because it was easier for us to represent what was already familiar to us.

Sanchez de la Barquera Estrada: We wanted a very minimalist look, so we tried to keep the simplicity of the clouds as much as possible. In this short film, which has no dialogue, we wanted to make the facial movements very expressive. By keeping the facial lines as minimal as possible, we ended up reviewing and analyzing each emotion in its purest form.

In contrast to the simplicity of the design, the characters are constantly changing shape, so the mechanics had to be complex but still recognizable. We focused on texture and softness, trying to break the edges as much as possible to give the clouds an ethereal feel. We had to develop a specific pipeline to process the texture particles and break the edges in a manageable way. This was a quantum leap because we could only test a few shots before going into full-scale production.