‘In Waves’ Is the Animated Tearjerker You Need to See

There’s a moment in In Waves where a boy skateboards home alone in the rain, completely elated, and it’s so joyful and so specific and so obviously doomed that you already feel the ache before the movie even gets there. That’s the particular kind of emotional intelligence running through Phuong Mai Nguyen’s stunning animated feature debut — a film that knows exactly what it is and commits to it completely.

The film opened the Critics’ Week section of the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, making history as the first animated title to do so, and it arrives as a beautifully rendered adaptation of AJ Dungo’s 2019 graphic novel. Scripted by Fanny Burdino and Samuel Doux, it tells the true story of AJ and Kristen — two Los Angeles high school students who fall in love across the divide of a skateboard and a surfboard. AJ (voiced in English by Will Sharpe) is shy, artistic, and deeply aquaphobic. Kristen (Stephanie Hsu) is confident, luminous, and spiritually connected to the ocean in a way that borders on devotional. He literally knocks her over at a school dance. She drags him into the water anyway.

The courtship is rendered with real tenderness — their first kiss under an inky night sky, the agonizing suspension of time after a text is sent to someone you can’t stop thinking about, their FaceTime chats and forbidden late-night meet-ups. Nguyen captures the particular electricity of being young and falling hard with a sun-kissed watercolor palette that makes Southern California feel like a place where anything is possible. The sight of AJ skateboarding home in the rain after that first kiss would, as one critic put it, make Gene Kelly proud.

A Love Story Built on Waves — and History

What sets In Waves apart from a standard YA romance is Kristen’s deep reverence for surfing’s history and cultural roots. She prays to a statue of Duke Kahanamoku — the Native Hawaiian Olympic swimmer she credits with popularizing surfing after Christian missionaries colonized Hawaii and banned the practice. That history is woven into the film through striking black-and-white sequences drawn in the style of pen-and-ink illustration, depicting pre-colonial Hawaiian surfing rituals. In one genuinely breathtaking moment, the curves of ocean waves, tree bark, and Kristen’s hair swirl together in one unified visual poem.

These monochrome interludes also become AJ’s art school thesis — the lines between Dungo’s original drawings and Nguyen’s visual world deliberately blurring as the story progresses. A third timeline, drained of color, follows a solitary AJ living in a van on the beach, sketching the ocean and Kristen’s face. It’s meant to feel mysterious, though most viewers will read where it’s heading fairly quickly.

Alongside Kristen and AJ, a tight friend group forms — her brother Jeff (Griffin Puatu), cousin Eon (Johnny Young), and AJ’s best friend Francisco (Alejandro Antonio Ruiz), whose awkward driveway goodbye when he moves away is one of the screenplay’s most quietly perfect moments of adolescent feeling.

When the Wave Breaks

The shift, when it comes, is masterfully handled. A middle-of-the-night crisis — Kristen immobilized by pain in her leg — snaps the film’s warm expansiveness shut. The cancer diagnosis that follows is all the more devastating for how thoroughly Nguyen has made us fall for these two people first.

From there, In Waves walks every step of Kristen’s journey — through hospitals and clinics, through the decision to amputate her leg and learn to surf again with a prosthetic, through the cancer’s return and the reshuffling of everything. AJ earns the trust of her protective parents. The couple fights about sacrifice and the future. They take a road trip up the Pacific coast — icy, beautiful, terrifying — to make memories on Kristen’s own terms. Nguyen captures the mossy textures and vibrant exuberance of the Pacific Northwest with genuine delicacy.

Sharpe and Hsu are warm and committed throughout, though a few critics have noted that their upbeat energy occasionally sits at a slight remove from the film’s deeper melancholy — a byproduct, perhaps, of the fact that the film was originally recorded in French with a different cast. The French version, featuring Rio Vega and Lyna Khoudri, is scheduled for release in France and Belgium in July.

Where Critics Land

The reviews out of Cannes are largely enthusiastic, with most landing somewhere between admiring and genuinely moved. The Hollywood Reporter called it “an understated marvel” with “a strong emotional throughline,” praising the way Nguyen “strikes a fine balance between narrative and visual language.” Variety noted that the film “honors every step of Kristen’s journey” and avoids the trap that sinks similarly themed films — never making Kristen’s illness merely a vehicle for AJ’s coming-of-age. “His grief over Kristen touches and bruises our souls,” the review noted, “precisely because we get to know her endearing idiosyncrasies on a uniquely personal level.”

The more skeptical take comes from IndieWire, which acknowledged the gorgeous animation but argued the film leans too hard on familiar “sick-girl-inspires-artist” tropes and never fully escapes AJ’s adoring gaze to give Kristen a fully independent interior life. “His version of Kristen,” the review observed, “without any of her interiority.” The film’s closing voiceover — in which AJ reflects that grief, like the ocean, comes in waves and must be ridden — landed as profound for some and a bit fortune-cookie for others.

Both responses feel honest, and both can be true simultaneously. In Waves is, by design, an unapologetically conventional tearjerker. It knows the wave is coming. It wants you to stand there and let it hit you anyway.

The film is currently without a U.S. distributor, which feels like a gap that won’t last long. Nguyen — whose previous credits include the French animated series Culottées and storyboard work on The Ollie & Moon Show — has made something that works both as a visual showcase and as a deeply human love story. Whether it finds its audience among YA fans, animation devotees, or anyone who’s ever lost someone and felt the grief come back in unexpected surges, there’s a real crowd here waiting to be found.

AJ Dungo asked his girlfriend to let him tell their story. She said yes. This is what that looks like.