'Julián' Review: Cartoon Saloon's Vibrant Queer Brooklyn Tale — SkimNews
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- Cartoon Saloon released "Julián," an animated adaptation of Jessica Love's 2018 picture book "Julián is a Mermaid," set in a Brooklyn Latino neighborhood and built around a boy's love of mermaids.
- Louise Bagnall directs the feature (her debut) alongside co-directors Guillaume Lorin and Mark Mullery, after earning an Oscar nomination for her 2019 short "Late Afternoon."
- Screenwriter Juliany Taveras — who the source identifies as a non-binary, queer, Afro/Indigenous Dominican American New Yorker — wrote the script to anchor cultural authenticity, including introducing the Orisha deity Yemayá through a kindhearted bodega owner.
- Knyght Darius Jac voices seven-year-old Julián and Milcania Diaz-Rojas voices grandmother Carmela, a Dominican immigrant whose performance shifts between English and Spanish.
- The film features fluid water animation and aquatic imagery that the review draws comparisons to Hayao Miyazaki's "Ponyo," with detailed production design in Carmela's home down to its refrigerator magnets.
- Carmela explicitly subverts the strict-abuela archetype — the review contrasts her directly with the grandmother in Pixar's "Coco" — by listening to Julián and accepting his gender expression rather than punishing it.
- The central conflict comes from gossipy neighbors and other boys objecting to Julián's flamboyant mermaid costume, while Julián's refusal to "dim himself" is framed as a lesson aimed at the surrounding adults.
Why it matters: Cartoon Saloon expands its Oscar-nominated folklore filmography to the Latinx diaspora, with non-binary, Afro/Indigenous Dominican American writer Juliany Taveras anchoring the cultural adaptation. By having grandmother Carmela accept rather than correct Julián's gender expression, the film flips the strict-abuela trope into a story where the adults — not the child — are the ones who need to learn.
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