Bad Bunny - DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (2025)
The frog inside us all.
A very recent release this week, maybe even too topical for a newsletter that’s generally meant to be about uncovering past gems of music videos, but a beautiful example of the level of production and thinking that goes into the visual accompaniments of songs and albums.
DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, a short film directed and written by Bad Bunny in collaboration with Arí Maniel Cruz Suárez, stars legendary Puerto Rican filmmaker Jacobo Morales as a man reflecting on his life in his native country—and showing his treasured photographs to a frog voiced by Kenneth Canales. It’s a film about home, and how home changes, and how we change with it but perhaps not in the same way. In that way, it’s a film about regret, much like the album itself. It’s also, of course, about colonization and the losses experienced under occupation.
The frog in DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS is a coquí frog, a species native to Puerto Rico and a cultural icon of the island. Its known especially for its nocturnal songs, and over time, its population on the island has multipled rather than diminished. His appearance — a bit of magical realism — in the video as Jacobo’s confidante and conscience is about the part of Jacobo that’s inextricably tied to the island, a spirit that’s multiplied even as he’s surrounded by the evidence of modernity and colonial power at every turn.
Puerto Rican writer Ann Dávila Cardinal has a quote where she says:
“Oh, my friends, magical realism is not a trope, and it is not a story that happens to have magic in it. It is a literary movement of the colonized.” (Jan 17, 2022).
She adds later:
“I realized all these magical realist tales I had been reading throughout my life were about that feeling of not owning your destiny, of your rights and ability to survive being dictated by a colonizing force.”
Jacobo Morales, the director featured in the video, might agree with this. His film Lo que le pasó a Santiago (mild spoiler here) ends with a surprising reveal about the woman the main character, a retired widow, has fallen in love with, transforming the story from one about love after loss to one about grief and longing.
There are several beautiful moments in the film, as well as painful ones. I especially love the scene where Jacobo rides through the town blasting VeLDÁ from his jeep, because the frog says “So, if no one does it anymore, why don’t you?” Seems like this film, and the album, are Bad Bunny’s response.
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