On a Friday afternoon in September, Vicente Canales’s iPhone began to vibrate with messages almost immediately after a private screening at the Toronto International Film Festival of an Argentine film called “Metegol.” Three film distributors in South Korea wanted to buy the rights from the firm run by Canales, a rumpled Spanish rights agent.

It was a big turnaround for the movie, an animated feature about the table game known as foosball (or, in Argentine Spanish, metegol). Two years earlier, when the film’s producers were pre-selling the rights based on a script and a teaser—a common practice—a Korean group had offered two hundred thousand dollars, far below the five-hundred-thousand-dollar asking price.

“They liked the story, but they said, ‘You’re asking too much. To pay you that, we have to watch the movie,’” Jorge Estrada Mora, a producer for the film, told me.

That was before this summer, when almost two million people in Argentina watched “Metegol,” about a geeky kid named Amadeo whose foosball figures come to life and help him take on a professional soccer team, in order to save his town and win back the respect of his sweetheart.

Now Canales says he found himself hosting a bidding war in his suite on the nineteenth floor of Toronto’s Hyatt Regency. One group dropped out at three hundred thousand dollars, but the other two continued until bidding reached the asking price, according to Estrada Mora. That Monday morning, Estrada Mora and Canales came to an agreement with Seoul-based Korea Screen.

According to Canales, Korea Screen’s C.E.O. “said it had a production quality that could proudly stand alongside any Hollywood animated movie.” Canales added, “He was very surprised that an independent production could achieve that level.” (I couldn’t reach Korea Screen for comment.)

With its hometown success behind it, the new question is whether audiences outside of Argentina will get it. Universal Pictures has bought distribution rights for Latin America and Spain, and other companies have picked up Russia, China, the U.K., Portugal, Turkey, the Middle East, Italy, and Poland. The producers are also in negotiations with distributors in the U.S., Estrada Mora told me. Premières in Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil will begin next month. If the film is successful, it would represent the latest step toward relevance for animated features made outside the U.S., and could influence how Hollywood makes animated films in the future.

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Soccer is a national obsession in Argentina, the birthplace of the star players Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi, but “Metegol” was designed to be more than a home-crowd pleaser. Directed in Buenos Aires by Juan José Campanella, a star in the Latin American film world, the 3-D film had a budget of twenty-two million dollars. This was tiny by Hollywood standards, but people in the Argentine film industry believe “Metegol” is by far the most expensive Argentine movie ever made.

“I think this is the first film made in Argentina where we knew from the beginning that even if every Argentine saw it twice, it wouldn’t make its money back,” Campanella said at a press screening in early July.

Like the movie’s protagonist, Campanella was an un-athletic youth, and he became a paunchy adult. But after gaining some forty pounds while writing the “Metegol” script, he worked himself into the body of a near athlete. This physique, combined with his closely cropped beard and the black flat cap he prefers, sometimes gives him the aspect of a longshoreman.

In 2008, a young Argentine producer named Gastón Gorali approached Campanella with a short monologue in the voice of an arrogant soccer star, written by the late Argentine cartoonist Roberto Fontanarrosa. “Though he never says it outright, you begin to realize that he is a foosball player,” Campanella said. “After saying he’s a great soccer player, he begins adding details like, ‘I remember that glorious afternoon when we scored a hundred and twenty-seven goals.’” Intrigued by the story, and by Gorali’s claim that an animated feature based on it could be made for two million dollars, Campanella agreed to direct.

Two years later, after Campanella won the foreign language Oscar for “El Secreto de Sus Ojos” (“The Secret in Their Eyes”), his agent, John Ufland, fielded more than a dozen invitations to consider Hollywood directorial gigs. But Campanella declined, deciding instead to stick with his plan to use the foosball monologue to make an animated movie—a film unlike anything he had ever done, yet whose ambitions (and budget) grew nonetheless. He also decided to do it in Buenos Aires, a city without an animated-movie industry.

Campanella and his longtime producer Estrada Mora, a Colombian petroleum entrepreneur, kitted out a ten-thousand-square-foot animation studio and brought in experienced animators like Sergio Pablos, who owns a Madrid animation studio and was an executive producer of the 2010 animated hit “Despicable Me,” to teach them how to run the production. Live-action directors, Pablos explained, “are accustomed to having actors on a set and immediate results”; in animation, scenes are minutely planned and the audio recorded before a single frame is animated. And because each animator produces only an average of four seconds a week, there is almost no chance for multiple “takes.” As Campanella learned animation, he wrote the script with Eduardo Sacheri, the author of the book on which “El Secreto de Sus Ojos” was based.

To keep costs down, Campanella and his producers contracted a small number of top animators, like Pablos, and paired them with young—and inexpensive—Argentine computer artists. To convince artists to work for less than their usual salaries, they positioned the Oscar-winning Campanella as a Woody Allen-like auteur and played up Buenos Aires’s reputation as an exotic hot spot.

In addition, the producers inked discount deals with technology companies and did not hire any of the expensive executives that fill Hollywood studios.

“I always ask what the executives bring to the table,” Campanella said. “Because in my experience it’s never been anything good.”

Even though the twenty-two-million-dollar production meant leaving out details in hair, grass, and water, which would have been expensive to animate, the quality of the animation is indistinguishable, to the average movie-goer, from major U.S. studio films. “The same movie would have cost a minimum of a hundred million dollars in Hollywood,” Pablos said. (Canales pegs that number at closer to fifty to sixty million dollars.)

There were tense moments. On a sweltering day in February, the electricity went out in the converted warehouse in the affluent Bajo Belgrano neighborhood where two hundred animators were working on the film. It was the third time in fifteen minutes that that part of the city’s weak electrical grid had collapsed. Campanella’s smile tightened. Without electricity, the animators could not work, and Campanella had only two hours to review the day’s progress before he was to travel to Los Angeles. He exclaimed some choice words in Spanish about the whore who gave birth to the electrical grid. Then he joked, wryly, “DreamWorks is doing this. They won’t let us succeed.”

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