Phuong Mai Nguyen's "In Waves," which premiered at Cannes, adapts a graphic memoir into a feature that dazzles visually but stumbles narratively. The film's animation is undeniably gorgeous, with fluid character work and painterly backgrounds that justify the festival buzz. Yet beneath that visual polish lies a story that treads familiar ground in ways that blunt its emotional impact.
The adaptation follows a well-worn path for tragic animated features. The graphic novel's intimate, personal narrative loses momentum when expanded to feature length, resulting in pacing issues that work against audience investment. Nguyen orchestrates sequences with technical precision, but the film struggles to translate the source material's page-turning momentum into cinematic flow. The memoir's specific details and nuanced character moments get swallowed by the broader arc.
What emerges is a film that looks exceptional but feels distant. The animation style, while consistently excellent, becomes a shield rather than a window into the characters' lives. Viewers find themselves admiring the craftsmanship rather than connecting with the human story. This disconnect proves particularly damaging for a narrative centered on grief and loss, emotions that require intimacy the film fails to establish.
"In Waves" arrives in a competitive landscape for animated features addressing heavy themes. Recent entries like "The Boy and the Heron" and "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse" demonstrated how animation can handle profound emotion without sacrificing visual ambition. Nguyen's film has ambition in spades but misjudges the balance between form and feeling.
The project shows directorial promise. Nguyen's technical command and visual storytelling demonstrate competence behind the camera. The problem isn't execution of the mechanics but rather the choices made in adaptation. Translating a graphic memoir requires understanding what made the source material resonate on the page, then finding cin