’Donkey Princess’ Review: A French Fairytale Gets a Stunning Reimagining from Two Animation Legends

When filmmakers predominantly known for animation make the leap to live-action features, you can never predict whose skill with wondrous image-making and imaginative storytelling will successfully translate to the different medium. It’s not even always a matter of the limitations of flesh-and-blood performers and physical locations hindering ambitious ideas that are easier to realize, with limited compromise, when you can control everything on paper, in a computer or with clay and puppetry. Even veterans given considerable resources and artistic freedom for a live-action feature may find their specific sensibilities are just better suited to animation.

For every high-quality live-action debut like “The Red Spectacles” (Mamoru Oshii), “Office Space” (Mike Judge) or “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol” (Brad Bird), there’s an admirable but lacking big swing like “John Carter” (Andrew Stanton) or “Attila Marcel” (Sylvain Chomet) – or, heaven forbid, a disaster like “Jonah Hex” (Jimmy Hayward). What tends to work a little better on average is when the live-action film is produced as more of a hybrid with the techniques that made the director’s name. Henry Selick’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s “James and the Giant Peach,” for example, effectively ended up still being a glorified animated feature, with the live-action material reserved for lengthy bookends when the title character wasn’t hanging out on or inside that really big fruit.

Selick’s fellow peers in stop-motion animation, Chilean directors Cristobal León and Joaquín Cociña, pulled off a similar feat with their first proper foray into live-action filmmaking. A few years after their horror-animation feature debut “The Wolf House” (2018) unsettled basically everyone who saw it (with some equally spooky shorts released before and after), the pair followed that up with “The Hyperboreans” in 2024: a blend of live-action with stop-motion animation and puppetry, where the production design surrounding the human performers very much still resembled something from their fully animated works. Exploring the historical legacy of Miguel Serrano, a Chilean writer known for his neo-Nazi beliefs, “The Hyperboreans” had a touch more specificity to its political themes than the more global crowd-pleasing aims of many of the live-action debuts cited above – although maybe “Jonah Hex” has some sharp observations about fascism, it’s been a while.

With their second live-action feature, the fantasy “Donkey Princess,” León and Cociña successfully use a (seemingly) much bigger budget and canvas for a continuation of that hybrid approach, though for a narrative that’s aiming for something a little more universal in its focus. Sorry to Selick, but a “Monkeybone”-style sophomore live-action misfire this most certainly is not. The Chilean duo’s latest only further establishes them as some of the most exciting makers of tangible, macabre visions on the world’s stage.

The more mainstream quality to the narrative of “Donkey Princess” is that it’s inspired by the famous French fairytale “Donkeyskin” (most notably adapted for the screen by Jacques Demy), though one certainly hopes people en masse are not resonating with the incestuous king character in that story. Offering a darker-hued, though no less visually stimulating flipside to Demy’s pastel-hued take (while also excising any musical element), the early goings of “Donkey Princess” – excluding an ominous opening bookend – sticks to some of the same beats of its loose source material: A princess (Diana, played by Antonia Giesen) becomes suffocated by her father’s (Francisco Melo) actions and obsessions in the long aftermath of grief following the death of her mother. Also, they have a prized donkey in their home. 

In the fairytale, the princess flees to another kingdom for a while to get away from the misery brought on by her father, finding work as a commoner to conceal her identity. In “Donkey Princess,” the departure to another kingdom at the end of the first act is instead a journey across time and space. And it won’t be the only one. But before all that, Diana meets an appealing suitor, Lalo (Andrew Bargsted), who seems to teleport into her birthday party. The problem for their blooming romance is that the king, his heart broken by his wife’s death from the plague, has outlawed the disease known as love anywhere in the land he rules: a fairytale reimagining of Chile, where the humans wander through sets that wouldn’t look out of place in a Laika production, small 2D-animated birds pepper the skies, and the occasional forest scene resembles the silhouette animation of Lotte Reiniger.

Before steps are taken to banish suitor Lalo from the kingdom, the young man gifts Diana with a reportedly magical bracelet he was given by a mysterious old woman in a desert; the same piece of jewellery apparently responsible for him appearing at Diana’s party out of thin air. “If you press this button,” Lalo was instructed by the old woman, “the bracelet will grant your wishes. They won’t come true in your kingdom, but in a distant kingdom and at another time. You will travel to that kingdom.”

When hope seems lost that she and Lalo will ever be together, Diana presses the button on the bracelet. Suddenly, her consciousness is transported to another version of herself. She’s in the same body, but her princess garments are now replaced with a winter coat and sweater, as she’s nearly hit by oncoming traffic. She’s in a world vaguely reminiscent of our present, with cars and apartment complexes, except the surrounding traffic as she finds her bearings is animation that moves like the background details of the “Spider-Verse” films. Here, she is the wife of Lalo, the couple working as pest control for a widespread infestation of bats, in a city where a health crisis sees a curfew imposed by the Chilean government. Her father is here, too, though he’s at least on seemingly more hospitable terms with Lalo than in the world where he wanted him dead – at least that’s the impression on the surface.

The surfaces continue to change as the button keeps on getting pushed, placing and recasting Diana, Lalo and The King in new contexts, each vaguely modelled on different film genres and with varying levels of playful artifice. In one “kingdom,” Diana is an actress wearing a donkey costume for a regular TV show gig; in another, she’s a woman on a beach married to another man, whose eye is unavoidably drawn to Lalo playing with his own partner and child.

There’s some fun to naming the direction the film takes as “Princess Diana Who Can Recall Her Past Lives,” though the recent movie that really springs to mind while watching “Donkey Princess” is “The Beast,” Bertrand Bonello’s time and consciousness-hopping adaptation of Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle;” especially with how radically different each timeline in that sci-fi tale was.

“The Beast” notably builds to a memorably ‘feel bad’ ending that’s appropriately devastating and built up for maximum impact. If there is one nagging element to the otherwise impressive “Donkey Princess,” it’s that the more melancholic notes of its last stretch veer into wheel-spinning towards a telegraphed final resolution. That said, while the concluding section sags a bit, it does still contain one of the more viscerally upsetting examples of body-horror imagery – done with grisly practical effects and crunchy sound – of recent memory. If León and Cociña ever want to go full horror mode with another live-action effort, “Donkey Princess” hints that they’re more than capable of joining that genre’s royalty.