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Politicized Web Praxis in Mexican Animated Short Films: Reality 2.0 (2012) & Retrato Político (2013)


A book chapter in Animation in Mexico, 2006 to 2022: Box Office, Web Shorts, and Streaming
Ed. David Dalton, SUNY Press, 2025 

A screenshot of crowdsourcing stillframes that make up the animated film, Retrato político.

Unpacking it, years later


It’s a full-circle moment when I unpacked my complimentary copy of the edited volume when I arrived home from my web job at the office. 

I wrote this chapter when I was deep in my dissertation phase of my doctorate, and I wouldn’t have known that “web praxis” would become my trade, and that it would become the defacto way of life post-pandemic. 

I’m no longer an academic writing about the web and cultural products living in the web, but I’m working with the nuts and bolts of how web works and presents content that needs to be seen at the appropriate time. 

I’m a rule-follower, and, in some cases, a rule-maker online, but this chapter is all about how two Mexican animators leveraged what was newly available to them, bent the rules, and created stories that move, transform, and make strong political statements through animation.

Using Web tools for animation


I focused on two short films by Mexican animators made around the same time period during Web 2.0.

Reality 2.0 (2012) by Victor Orozco 

Orozco’s website labels Reality 2.0 as an animated documentary since the film is comprised of mostly live-action footage mined from online clips as well as screen-captures of web browsing that are traced over with animation (rotoscope method).

Not only is Reality 2.0 born-digital, but it could be considered almost entirely born-online since most of the material in the short film already existed as uploaded digital content that was remixed to create a narrative about living abroad in Germany and looking upon Mexico through the lens of posted online content. 

A screenshot from Reality 2.0  at 02:38 of a YouTube reaction video with animation on top. 

Watch the short on Orozco’s website

Retrato político (2013) by Güincho Núñez

This two-minute short film uses animation to stitch together a montage of crowdsourced digital drawings of a headless political figure giving a speech. Núñez created a Facebook group to mount the project and collect the stillframes to animate the film.


A stillframe from Retrato político at 01:36 during the speech in Spanish with English subtitles. 

Interviewing both directors


I was once told by a professor to “never interview the filmmaker.”

To that, I promptly decided to ignore that advice, because my take on it is that good reserach means that if the filmmaker is still alive, you should try to reach out to them and find out what really happened when they were making the film.

Interviewing both Víctor and Güincho to write this article revealed so much about their animation practice, their journeys as artists for financing and creation, and some really crazy stuff that happened to them online that inspired their films.

My favourite quotation from Güincho:

“I think that the biggest quality that animation has is the power to transform. I think that we can deform reality and mold it ... make it what we want. This quality in amiation is rebellious in and of itself.”  (Interview translated from Spanish, 18:00-18:25) 

My favourite quotation from Víctor when we talked about the explosion of content generation online:

“That transformation of content generation that I saw made me think, ‘okay what’s my position as an artist?’ If I’ve been robbed of my unique ability to create content, then by necessity, I’ve become a curator. Therefore, I select material to then generate a new syntaxis of sorts but with content that is created by other people not just by me.” 
(Interview translated from Spanish, 11:32-12:23)

Huge thanks to both Güincho & Víctor for sharing your thoughts and talents!

How to access my chapter