‘Here’s The Plan’ Director Fernanda Frick Returns To Animation With ‘Last Journey’ Teaser (EXCLUSIVE)

Fernanda Frick (Here’s the Plan) has finally closed the loop on a project she first set in motion in 2020, during the peak of the pandemic. Today, the filmmaker, a former Cartoon Brew promising Latina director to keep an eye on, is debuting the completed teaser for Último Viaje (Last Journey), marking a return to animation for the accomplished Chilean multi-hyphenate.

“This project, Último Viaje, started around 2020,” Frick explains. “I applied to a government grant to make a slate of projects for my studio… and among them was a trailer for Último Viaje.” The plan, she says, was strategic and pragmatic: “The idea was to make a slate to start pitching projects.” That same slate included her series-turned-graphic novel Raise the Bar, which was developed at Netflix for a time, as well as other projects, including the Last Journey trailer.

But life, and opportunity, intervened. As Frick secured a book deal for Raise the Bar after it was dropped by Netflix, the Last Journey trailer was finished, never pitched, and went into hibernation on her computer’s hard drive.

“The trailer was produced, but then I never got to pitch it,” she says. “I was like, ‘I can’t do both [the book and develop Last Journey] at the same time.’” What she assumed would be a brief pause stretched far longer. “That was supposed to be one or two years,” Frick laughs. “But it turned into five.”

The teaser itself introduces Zero and Vanilla, two friends on the cusp of adulthood who set off on a backpacking trip across Chile. Conceived as a stop-motion series, although that format isn’t necessarily set in stone, Last Journey is intentionally tranquil. “It’s so grounded. It’s so low key,” Frick says. “It’s two friends backpacking through the country… through Chile.”

That grounded tone is matched by the tactile warmth of puppets and sets designed and constructed in Chile, a country famous for its stop-motion work.

“I love stop motion. I’ve always wanted to do stop motion,” she says, tracing the impulse back to her teenage years. “I tried doing stop motion with a webcam and clay and aluminum paper when I was 13… but I was afraid of drilling,” she jokes, explaining why she waited until adulthood to return to the art form. Directing, she realized, was her way in. “My best chance at it was directing one. So when I got the financing for the slate and this pilot, it was like, ‘I want this to be stop motion.’”

To bring the teaser to life, Frick partnered with longtime collaborator Cecilia Toro at Plastivida, crediting Toro as co-director. “Cecilia took the very small budget we had, and she made magic with it,” Frick says. Toro led the on-the-ground production, building puppets and sets and assembling a team while Frick supervised remotely during lockdown.

Among that team was Hugo Covarrubias, later Oscar-nominated for the Pinochet-era stop-motion short Bestia. “It’s incredible,” Frick says. “You see Bestia and it’s such dark subject matter, and then he was animating my cute characters.” Covarrubias served as both sole animator and director of photography, while Frick’s own team handled script, design, and post-production.

Finishing the teaser now feels like a turning point, as Frick has spent months finishing the Raise the Bar book, which comes out later this summer, published by Penguin Random House. With that project wrapping up, she explains, “There were tiny details left to do in post-production, so I finally had time to finish that. So I’m finally going back to animation, I guess.”

What happens next remains deliberately open. Frick hasn’t pitched the project yet and is reconsidering its format. “It was conceived as a series, a stop-motion series,” she says, “but now I’m wondering if that could change.”

The realities of production have shifted her thinking. “From a production standpoint, it was a bad idea to make a stop-motion series about traveling,” she admits, referencing the effort that would be required to construct so many detailed and diverse locations. “So now I’m thinking of it maybe more like a feature film.”

That flexibility reflects lessons learned since Raise the Bar. “I used to think, ‘This is exactly what this project will be,’” Frick says. “And I think the industry kind of proved to me that you can’t really stick too closely to a single plan.”

For now, Last Journey begins modestly. “I’m just uploading it to YouTube to see what the reception is going to be,” she says.

After half a decade of waiting, Last Journey is finally moving again, both as a pitch and as an invitation to audiences, potential collaborators, and to Frick herself, as she returns to the art form on her own terms.