TIFF Premiere ‘Julián’ Finds Joy, Identity and Family in a Colorful Animated World

Cartoon Saloon animator Louise Bagnall makes her feature directorial debut with “Julián,” based on the children’s book “Julián Is a Mermaid” by Jessica Love. It tells the story of a 7-year-old boy who spends the summer with his abuela in Brooklyn. He digs into her colorful past in the Dominican Republic and follows his dream to become a mermaid, while she unlocks long-buried memories as they both discover truths about who they are and the power of self-expression, identity and family. Zoe Saldaña is one of the executive producers, while Film New Europe is handling international sales; CAA Film Sales has U.S.

The source material and the film are very sophisticated in probing familial tension, melancholic yearnings and bullying.

“Certainly one of the most exciting aspects of adapting it was being able to explore our characters in a deeper way, and also be able to show this whole other side to abuela and also to Julián’s own heritage,” says Bagnall, who has an Oscar nomination for animated short “Late Afternoon.”

She notes that the film’s screenwriter, Juliany Taveres, “brought so much to the film in terms of specificity — they’re from Brooklyn” while co-director (with Mark Mullery) Guillaume Lorin grew up in the Caribbean.

“Julián” is joyous and colorful — as you would expect of a film that celebrates Latin culture as well as the flora and fauna of the sea, and mermaids.

“So even though the film has this joyful, celebratory tone, there is there is for me a level of sophistication to the storytelling that comes from the feeling that these characters are real and that their difficulties or their conflict or the challenges are kind of coming from something that also feels quite believable,” she says. “I thought that the medium of animation could actually do a wonderful job telling that story.”

And while Julián’s imagination and dream of being a mermaid drives the story, there is tension with his grandmother — her own memories of her life in the DR before she came to the U.S. have been buried. Julián is a catalyst for “her own understanding of who she is and her own kind of loss,” says Bagnall. She also embraces joy in the end and is able to “re-embrace a part of herself and a part of her life that she thought was gone.”

That heritage and the grit of Brooklyn collide onscreen in colors and sounds. “It was important for us not to make the world feel pristine and polished. We wanted to try and keep that little bit of roughness around the edge, so that you could see weeds growing out of the pavement, or you see cracks in the wall, so that it felt believable and specific, but still beautiful, even in its even in its imperfection. It’s beautiful, and I think that again ties back to the themes of the film, and how we aren’t all perfect, but we can make the most of it.”

Julián’s imagination lends itself to magical realism: swimming in the sea with creatures and when the spell is broken, there’s water all over the apartment. There’s several charming scenes that exude the pure joy of a 7-year-old’s mind.

“In this day and the age of AI, we still actually make a lot of our work on paper,” says Bagnall. “Now, we do the animation on the computer, but it’s still with the hand drawn [characters, etc.]. All the backgrounds are made on paper with pencils and markers. The idea was that we were using the same tools that Julian would have in his pencil case.”

“Julián” is at TIFF looking for distribution, and is produced by Nora Twomey, Tomm Moore, Paul Young, Anthony Leo, Andrew Rosen, Stephan Roelants, Fabien Renelli, Charlotte de la Gournerie and Lewis Taylor.