Ricardo Arnaíz

***Ricardo Arnaíz*** was born in Puebla, Mexico on June 4th, 1974. He is a well known businessman in his native country and the founder of Animex Productions. One of his most successful projects has been *La Leyenda de la Nahuala*, which began to take shape as early as 2005, and went onto receive support from the state of Puebla to see it come to fruition.

## Connection to The Amazing Brutus

He’s a writer, producer and director of animated films from Mexico. His favorite part of being in the filmmaking and animation business is getting to create his own  stories, such as *La Leyenda de La Nahuala*. He mentions that despite this, he does often get approached by people with their own ideas and their own scripts. He mentions that as a result, he never closes the door on these cases.  He is always open to hear out new ideas, and hopes to be able to guide  these creative minds behind them, make their dreams come true and make their projects possible.

Ricardo mentions that  the current project he is working on came from a very unusual place. He was at the time working on another animated project  when he received an email from Armando Ibarra, who is the owner of an accounting firm that supervised all  the accounting matters of *El Americano: The Movie,* which was the last movie project he had been a part of. He was honestly surprised to and thought the email pertained to numbers or with reports and things of that nature.

Ricardo admits to have initially been confused  because the email was asking him to read a script, and he didn’t know exactly what to expect. He was actually already thinking of how to apologize (like saying to Armando that he thought it was a great story but just didn’t have the time for it or  something like that) because he was always so kind to him during the process of *El Americano: The Movie*. Above all else, he didn’t want to hurt Armando's feelings. However he was hooked right away on the story from the first page. He loved everything about it, from the story to the characters, and how well the script was written. He did have a lot of notes, but he liked that the story engaged him right away and he wanted to see more and keep on reading.  He wanted to see what would  become of these characters, what would the climax be and how would the film end?

Once he finished reading the script, he gave Armando a call and told him that he had a great project on his hands, and that he would love to be part of it. So he asked if he could be considered as either director or producer. But above all else, he wanted to help Armando as a fellow creative mind to make the movie. Ricardo admits that you never know when or from where  a good story will come from. Several discussions with Armando and Christian later,  Ricardo started developing  the movie and the characters with  his friend Eduardo Jimenez, who has a studio in Puebla, Mexico.  Initially, the two of them decided to go with 2D kind of style when it came to animation. However, after they saw the movie *Klaus*, which hails from Spain, they both thought and agreed that it was a great look and are now exploring this kind of animation and visual development. Ricardo adds that things are going great and they are also adding some Mexican style in there. But they also want this to be a co-production between  Mexico and the United States. They are currently gathering  all kinds of experts and from Hollywood to help them with all this development.

## Filmography

* La Leyenda de la Nahuala (2007)
* Nikté (2009)
* El Americano: The Movie (2016)
* Las Leyendas: El Origen (2022)
* Héroes (2023)