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Childhood is rarely as private as adults imagine it to be. A child’s gestures are watched, corrected, praised, softened, misread, and sometimes punished before the child has found the words for them. Julián, Louise Bagnall’s feature debut for Cartoon Saloon, understands that pressure without turning it into a sermon. Its young Dominican hero, voiced by Knyght Darius Jack, wants to be a mermaid, and the film treats that desire with the seriousness usually reserved for adult crisis.
Adapted from Jessica Love’s picture book Julián Is a Mermaid, the film expands a small, tender story into a Brooklyn summer. Julián arrives to stay with Abuela, voiced by Milcania Diaz-Rojas, a grandmother he barely knows. The visit begins with friction. He resists her cooking, rifles through her jewelry box, and turns the bathroom into a small domestic disaster zone. Bagnall frames these incidents less as misbehavior than as contact: a child touching the edges of a new world to see which parts might touch back.
The world itself matters. Abuela’s apartment is dense with personality, from the kitchen tiles to the houseplants crowding the living room. The fridge, the jewelry, the furniture, the food, and the sunlight all carry history. Nothing feels placed merely to decorate a Latino household for an international audience. The home appears lived in before Julián arrives, which allows his curiosity to feel like discovery rather than consumption.
A Home Learns to Listen
The finest emotional choice in Julián is its refusal to make Abuela an obstacle for cheap drama. She is cautious, practical, and watchful. She does not instantly understand Julián, and the film gives that pause moral weight. Acceptance here is not packaged as a speech. It arrives through attention.
That makes the shared food scene, built around green plantains, especially important. The dish becomes a point of contact between Julián and Abuela, not because food magically heals their distance, but because eating together creates a common rhythm. Bagnall lets the moment breathe through gesture, posture, and tone. Diaz-Rojas gives Abuela a guarded warmth, the kind that has to pass through habit before it can become softness.
Julián, by comparison, is all charged perception. Knyght Darius Jack gives him a voice full of spark without tipping into cartoon precocity. He observes before he asks, absorbs before he explains, and looks at the world as if every surface might contain a secret ocean. His fascination with Fran’s corner-shop fish tank is a perfect example. Fran, voiced by Manuel Rodriguez-Saenz, hands out ice pops and ocean lore, but the important detail is the tank itself: color, movement, scale, possibility. Julián looks at those fish and sees a form of life that escapes the rules of the sidewalk.
The neighborhood works because it surrounds him with ordinary enchantment. Dominoes, chalk drawings, summer heat, free treats, local girls with news of the Coney Island Mermaid Parade: each piece gives Julián a route toward himself. The parade does not appear as a random destination. It is a public space where self-invention has already been granted permission.
Fantasy With Roots
Cartoon Saloon’s animation has often carried a handmade charge, but Julián shifts away from the studio’s familiar folk-art contours. Its visual language is rounder, brighter, busier, closer to the marks a child might press onto paper with felt tips, crayons, colored pencils, and glitter. That choice is not cosmetic. The film’s form belongs to Julián’s gaze.
Bagnall and the animation team make Brooklyn feel tactile without flattening it into postcard warmth. The streets glow with summer, yet the film keeps its sense of density: shops, windows, stairwells, kitchens, plants, tiles, fabric, bodies in motion. The fantasy sequences are strongest when they seem to rise from those details rather than interrupt them. Julián’s ocean visions do not flee reality. They reveal what reality has been making possible.
The sea imagery carries several meanings at once: mermaid play, queer self-recognition, Caribbean memory, migration, ancestry, and freedom. The film has the discipline not to label each symbol for the viewer. A child becoming a mermaid can be read through gender expression, imagination, cultural inheritance, or all of these at once. The ambiguity is generous, since it protects Julián from becoming a thesis with glitter.
La-Nai Gabriel’s score helps hold that balance. Its Caribbean textures and oceanic movement give the film lift, especially in scenes where Julián’s inner life swells past the limits of Abuela’s rooms and neighborhood streets. The music does not tell the audience what to feel. It gives Julián’s wonder a current.
Where the Spell Thins
The film’s gentleness has real force, but its brevity leaves some figures with less shape than the world around them. Julián’s father remains underdrawn, which weakens the family pattern surrounding the boy. The local girls who introduce him to the Mermaid Parade bring energy and narrative purpose, yet their personalities stay light. A longer version might have allowed them to become peers rather than guides.
Still, the film’s emotional precision sits in smaller places. Abuela’s hesitation before support. Julián’s delight in costume pieces. The fish tank in Fran’s shop. The apartment becoming a treasure map. The parade waiting at the edge of the story like a promise already made by the city itself.
What Julián captures with rare clarity is the danger of embarrassment in childhood. Children often learn shame before they understand identity. Bagnall’s film answers that violence with color, patience, and care. It lets a boy imagine himself into visibility, then places beside him an elder who learns how to make room.
Following its mid-2026 premiere at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, this vibrant feature debut from director Louise Bagnall continues its rollout across international theatrical markets. The story follows a young boy spending a transformative summer with his grandmother in Brooklyn, where his vivid imagination and desire to express his true self lead to a heartwarming journey of discovery and cultural connection.
Where to Watch Julián Online
Full Credits
Title: Julián
Distributor: Cartoon Saloon, Aircraft Pictures, Melusine Productions, Sun Creature
Release date: June 2026 (Annecy International Animation Film Festival premiere)
Rating: Not Rated
Running time: 93 minutes
Director: Louise Bagnall, Guillaume Lorin, Mark Mullery
Writers: Juliany Taveras, Jessica Love
Producers and Executive Producers: Charlotte de La Gournerie, Anthony Leo, Tomm Moore, Fabien Renelli, Zoe Saldaña, Cisely Saldaña, Mariel Saldaña
Cast: Knyght Darius Jack, Milcania Diaz-Rojas, Zariah Georgia Ellis, Emma So, Avery Star Pryce Tibayan, Kim Roberts, Stephanie Herrera, Yanna McIntosh
Editors: Richie Cody, Owen Peters
Composer: La-Nai Gabriel
The Review
Julián
Julián turns a child’s mermaid dream into a tender grammar of visibility, culture, and care. Louise Bagnall’s film gives Brooklyn a tactile pulse through Abuela’s apartment, Fran’s fish tank, summer streets, plantains, glitter, and the Coney Island Mermaid Parade. Some supporting figures remain lightly drawn, especially Julián’s father and the local girls, yet the film’s emotional intelligence sits in its smallest gestures. It understands that acceptance often begins before language arrives.
PROS
- Tactile hand-drawn animation
- Tender Julián and Abuela bond
- Rich Brooklyn community detail
- Strong voice work
- Sensitive identity storytelling
CONS
- Thinly defined father
- Local girls need sharper texture
- Brief runtime limits side arcs
