WARRIOR IN MAYAN GLYPHS FULL

Growing up in Mexico City, where urban landscapes coexist with ancient edifices, Gutiérrez had access to the National Museum of Anthropology, which houses a vast collection of pre-Columbian artifacts, as well as the Templo Mayor, ruins of an Aztec temple near the metropolis’ main square. We hope it connects with the world, and if people can’t come to Mexico or to Latin America, don’t worry, they’re coming to visit you.”īelow, we take deep dive into Gutiérrez and Equihua’s enormous compendium of influences. “More than anything, we poured our hearts and soul into her story.

We saw her grow up from being a baby, and now she’s going out into the world, and we hope the world is kind to her because she’s a good person,” Gutiérrez said.

WARRIOR IN MAYAN GLYPHS FULL

Gutiérrez’s parents recently watched “Maya” in full and were moved to tears because, underneath the rousing adventure, the emotional heft of the familial bonds soar. “That she sees she has the power to do what she wants, because we need more Latinas in the arts.” “I hope that a little Latina girl out there decides to become an animation director and take the helm, or become creator, a designer, a writer,” Equihua said. As a storyteller, I got to tell the whole thing for good - but also for bad, by the way, because it was a lot of work.”įor Equihua, a pivotal aspect of updating the legends is to combat the misogyny inherent to them in their original readings by making the protagonist a punk rebel princess, prominently featuring strong goddesses or making the sun a feminine source of life.

“I’ve never felt more liberated than with this new format. No studio would let me make a four-and-a-half-hour movie, especially animated,” said Gutiérrez. I finally get to tell all the backstories. Traveling across the neighboring lands, she must enlist a team of warriors. Maya (Zoe Saldaña), the daughter of King and Queen Teca (lovingly voiced by Gutiérrez and Equihua, respectively), is tasked with upholding a prophecy to defeat Lord Mictlan (Alfred Molina), the ruler of the underworld who wants to sacrifice her. Over its 270-minute running time, the highly ambitious “Maya and the Three” follows a fierce teenager from Teca Kingdom destined to become an eagle warrior. In animation, the most widely seen examples were DreamWorks’ “The Road to El Dorado” and Disney’s “The Emperor’s New Groove” - both films where cultural aspects are “just there as an Epcot background version of it,” as Gutiérrez put it. Part of their undertaking was to peruse how these brilliant and advanced societies had been represented in media before. Though “Maya” deliberately doesn’t use the words Aztec, Mayan or Incan in order to maintain a certain distance between this magical fiction and fact, the art and ideologies of those cultures acted as the couple’s prime creative resource. “As Mexicans, we kind of put the ancient world so far behind us that you disconnect,” said Gutiérrez about the significance of reigniting interest in the past by realizing Indigenous people are part of our present. Together they previously executed their take on superheroes in the Nickelodeon show “El Tigre” and their fanciful rendering of the Day of the Dead via the Golden Globe-nominated animated feature “The Book of Life.” Now, with “Maya,” they’ve built a temple to the foundational civilizations of Latin America that is at once endearing and dazzling. Densely rich with mythology, formulated from a cornucopia of timeless and relatively recent sources, “Maya and the Three” is an animated magnum opus of superlative imagination, detailed craftsmanship, thrilling action and thoughtful, earned pathos set amid a whimsically breathtaking reimagining of Mesoamerica in antiquity.īehind this nine-chapter miniseries debuting on Netflix today is Mexican-raised, U.S.-based virtuoso director Jorge Gutiérrez and his close collaborator and wife, Sandra Equihua.

Warrior in mayan glyphs