Ana and Bruno (Ana y Bruno in Spanish) is a Mexican Horror Comedy animated film directed by Carlos Carrera and released on June 12, 2017. This film is unique amongst most others in that despite technically being child-friendly, it's willing to tackle subjects most films of its type would be wary of going near, like mental illness and ableism.
A young girl named Ana and her mother Carmen are committed to a psychiatric ward because they are both relentlessly tormented by a horrifying, flaming Eldritch Abomination that only they can see, which keeps trying to attack both of them. However, while exploring the ward, she ends up meeting Bruno, a kind-mannered goblin who turns out to be the hallucination of a paranoid schizophrenic, and soon finds the friendlier but no less strange and diverse hallucinations of the other patients, all given physical form. Soon, they all have to leave the ward and band together to find Ana's father so that he can prevent his wife from undergoing electroshock therapy under the hands of the ward's barbaric staff, all while slowly uncovering the dark truth about Ana's predicament.
Ana and Bruno provides examples of:
- Abhorrent Admirer: Rosie is a pink elephant hallucination of a neurotic, controlling woman, who is in love with Bruno and very possessive and jealous.
- The Ace: Bruno knows all of the other hallucinations inside and outside, and helps round them all up to help find Ana's father.
- Animate Inanimate Object: One of the hallucinations is a talking toilet.
- Bedlam House: The asylum Ana's mother is committed to has a gothic, depressive atmosphere and comes highly recommended for its effective treatments. The treatments we do see however involve tranquilizing worked up patients and electroshocking the more unruly ones into catatonia as a "cure".
- Big Creepy-Crawlies: Subverted with Black Widow, an enormous clown-faced spider, who ironically is among the sweetest of all the hallucinations.
- By the Eyes of the Blind: Hallucinations can only be perceived by animals, children, or the intoxicated. They can be loosely seen by the mentally ill, even ones that aren't a part of their illness.
- Dead All Along: Ana, half way through the film, turns out to be this (more specifically, a hallucination her mother is seeing of her dead daughter who died in a house fire).
- Disney Death: It seems like Ana pulls off a Heroic Sacrifice getting rid of the Fire Monster once and for all, but being a hallucination, she's all fine and dandy, thankfully.
- Eldritch Abomination: The Fire Monster that keeps trying to kill Carmen, destroying her cell more and more with each attack.
- Helpful Hallucination: Each and every one of the hallucinations are more than willing to help Ana find her father and save her mother from both the doctors and the Fire Monster.
- Mechanical Abomination: Tick is a being made entirely out of clockwork who seems to talk about time a little too much.
- Noodle Incident: When Bruno is introducing Ana to the other hallucinations and gets to Leftie, a giant hairy worm with a human hand with eyes and a nose for a head, he doesn't let her know what caused him to be born.Bruno: That hairy hand over there? I can't tell you what his owner was traumatized by.
- Psycho Psychologist: The psychologist that runs the asylum seems to take too much satisfaction in his "treatment" of electroshocking the insane into catatonia, especially when he forces Ana's father into a chair because he refuses to put his wife through it. Turns out all his orderlies were his hallucinations.
- They Walk Among Us: A scene at a train station in San Marcos illustrates that almost everyone has hallucinations, little neuroses that they unknowingly live with.
- Tomato in the Mirror: Ana turns out to be a hallucination of her mother who can't move on from her absence.
