Simón Bucher on the rough-and-dirty pixilation sequence in Chile's hit Denominación de Origen

Tomás Alzamora's Denominación de Origen, a comedy about the town of San Carlos campaigning for legal protection of its longaniza sausage, became Chile's most-watched domestic production of 2025 with more than 100,000 theatrical viewers. Its one animated passage is a stop-motion pixilation sequence by Chilean animator-director Simón Bucher. In an interview with Jamie Lang for Cartoon Brew, Bucher explained how it was made.

The sequence tells an invented origin myth for the sausage, which gives the townspeople their slightly dubious case for protected status. Bucher shot it in grainy black and white so it looks like photography from around 1900. He said he wanted the audience to feel they were looking at an old photo, or through one. He built it around a photograph of the supposed inventor of the longaniza, which Alzamora told him was really a picture of a family relative. A masked character stands in for the photo's indistinct face, bulb flashes recall early photographic equipment, and spurs, horseshoes and scraps of metal are worked into the sausage-making ritual alongside the San Carlos flag.

Alzamora found Bucher through The Feast, a pixilation horror short Bucher co-directed with Claudia Saldivia and Amanda Rivera as his graduation project at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. It screened at Annecy in 2023 and at the Ñuble National Film Festival. Alzamora gave him the live-action passage where the animation would go and wide creative freedom. Both men cited Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña's The Wolf House, and Bucher began his career as an intern at the Santiago studio where he worked alongside the two directors.

Bucher calls his approach 'rough and dirty'. It reflects the constraints of Latin American independent production, and he keeps fingerprints, smudges, slightly shifted frames and irregular movement on purpose as the visible trace of the people who made the film. He has since co-directed the short Gacela Gazette with Cote Ramírez. He is now developing his first feature, working title L4IK4, with his brother Raimundo as co-director. It is a hybrid of 3D animation, stop motion and pixilation.

The craft notes are folded into our Pixilation wiki page, alongside Dragonframe's own guidance for shooting live performers.