‘Donkey Princess’ Locarno Review: León and Cociña Twist the Fairy Tale Into Something Stranger

Straddling the line between a classical fairy tale and the more experimental storytelling that has defined their work, Donkey Princess is probably the closest Chilean filmmakers Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña have come to something resembling a conventional film. Blending animation and live action in consistently surprising ways, the film reworks a traditional story of kings and princesses by uprooting it from its expected settings and relocating it into a series of increasingly unlikely worlds. The result retains the duo’s signature qualities—fresh, curious, and marked by a peculiar mix of sophistication and deliberate amateurism—but in a format that feels, at least somewhat, more accessible to casual viewers.

Diana (Antonia Giesen) is a princess in a medieval-looking (animated) kingdom, living with her father, King Arthur (Francisco Melo). After the tragic death of his wife—Diana’s mother—he decrees a ban on love. Predictably, that restriction becomes untenable when Diana meets Lalo (Andrew Bargsted), a young outsider unfamiliar with the rules, who falls in love with her—and she with him. What initially seems like standard fairy-tale terrain fractures when Diana uses a magical bracelet to travel through time, placing her soul into what looks like a near future (or a parallel present) inhabited by the same people—still her father and her lover—but in a radically different context.

That shift is only the beginning of a chain of misadventures Diana must navigate, trying both to preserve her relationship with Lalo and remain faithful to her father’s love. León and Cociña, working in their characteristic handcrafted, DIY animation style, construct a succession of distinct worlds for Diana to pass through in search of one where happiness might be possible. The film gradually unfolds as a playful collage of references and even cinematic genres—romantic comedy, realist drama, science fiction, horror film, fairy tale—each one a station in a journey driven by a protagonist in pursuit of love and, more crucially, self-discovery.

Packed with cinephile nods, nods to B-movie adventure templates, and the kind of spatial-temporal ruptures (and fourth-wall breaks) that have become a hallmark of the directors’ work, Princesa burro brings together an unusual mix of childlike and adult animation, sharp and occasionally biting political commentary, and more recognizable genre situations. The film also layers in a dense audiovisual texture—its score by Jean-Benoît Dunckel, of the duo Air, is a key component—that enriches and complicates the whole. It screens in the international competition of the Swiss festival.

Indirectly, Donkey Princess reveals itself to be a more unsettling and darker film, thematically, than it first appears. Across the multiple universes its characters traverse—and in specific narrative turns best left undisclosed—the Chilean film offers a sharp critique not only of patriarchal authority but of the structures that sustain it, turning its deceptively playful premise into something far more disquieting beneath the surface.