{"id":669582,"date":"2026-05-14T19:39:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-14T19:39:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/669582\/"},"modified":"2026-05-14T19:39:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T19:39:08","slug":"tangles-review-a-striking-heartbreaking-animated-feature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/669582\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Tangles’ Review: A Striking, Heartbreaking Animated Feature"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe distinctive visual storytelling of Canadian cartoonist Sarah Leavitt is deftly and stylishly transferred to the big screen in \u201cTangles<\/a>,\u201d an honestly felt and highly affecting adaptation of her autobiographical graphic novel of the same name. Chronicling with tenderness and idiosyncratic humor her mother\u2019s battle with Alzheimer\u2019s disease, Leavitt\u2019s memoir has become a touchstone work for many enduring the same cruel rite of passage with their loved ones. Co-written with the author, and largely preserving the text\u2019s visual and narrative singularity, Leah Nelson<\/a>\u2018s candid, funny and incrementally heartbreaking adult animated feature \u2014 an impressive debut for the helmer \u2014 deserves to do the same.<\/p>\n

\n\tA characterful and extremely well-cast voice ensemble \u2014 including Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Abbi Jacobson and Bryan Cranston in principal parts, with producer Seth Rogen among the cameoing talent \u2014 reps an additional selling point for \u201cTangles,\u201d premiering in Cannes\u2019 non-competitive Special Screenings section, and sure to attract interest from distributors and streamers with an eye for prestige animation. LGBT-focused buyers and festival programmers, furthermore, should be drawn to the film\u2019s proudly specific grounding in Leavitt\u2019s queer life and identity, with the well-drawn subplot of a formative lesbian romance a spirit-lifting counterpart to the intimate family tragedy unfolding elsewhere.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn one significant change from the source material, the story has been relocated from Vancouver \u2014 home city of both Leavitt and Nelson \u2014 to the U.S., perhaps in part to more legibly delineate the growing physical and spiritual divide in its protagonist\u2019s life. Here, the twentysomething Sarah (Jacobson) is caught between coasts: Her family home is in sleepy suburban Maine, while she\u2019s carved out a place for herself in the vibrant queer scene of San Francisco, working as a receptionist and sometime illustrator at a hip alt-weekly, with a busy social life revolving around lesbian nightclubs and right-on political demonstrations. The year is 1999, and the city\u2019s evolution into a scarcely affordable tech capital is in progress, but not yet complete.<\/p>\n

\n\tAn aspiring artist and cartoonist, Sarah\u2019s loose, jagged, semi-surreal drawings reflect her restlessly engaged and excited view of the world \u2014 and in turn define the film\u2019s spunky, witty 2D animation style, executed mostly in sharply nuanced monochrome, with sporadic highlights of color (often in luminous violet or magenta) to emphasize core memories, flights of imagination or surges of feeling. Though art director Manddy Wyckens doesn\u2019t especially imitate Leavitt\u2019s less polished aesthetic, the film deftly channels a spontaneous, hand-drawn illustrative rhythm, in line with the sensibility of a character who sometimes draws her emotions more lucidly than she expresses them \u2014 and thus giving \u201cTangles\u201d far more than just a decorative reason for its medium.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s in San Francisco where Sarah feels most fully and expressively herself, surrounded by like-minded friends and co-workers \u2014 and Donimo (Samira Wiley), a formidably cool but disarmingly Zen motorcyclist with whom she begins, much to her own surprise, a passionate relationship. Not that family trips to Maine are any kind of ordeal. Sarah is loved and accepted by her liberal-minded academic parents Midge (Louis-Dreyfus) and Rob (Cranston) and younger sister Hannah (Beanie Feldstein), while pointed domestic details and childhood flashbacks paint a full picture of a supportive household environment that fostered our heroine\u2019s intelligence and individuality.<\/p>\n

\n\tOn one such trip, however, Sarah notices some erratic behavior on Midge\u2019s part: an iron left on, a word misused, a tetchily defensive response to any observation of these errors. Only in her mid-fifties, Midge is busy and content in her life. Dementia wasn\u2019t on anyone\u2019s list of immediate concerns, and Rob reasons that stress may be behind these out-of-character glitches. But an ostensibly restorative vacation to Mexico \u2014 which Sarah uses as an occasion to introduce her parents to Donimo \u2014 only highlights the symptoms of what a doctor eventually diagnoses as early-onset Alzheimer\u2019s.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd so this tale \u2014 as with so many others like it, in life and in film \u2014 can only go in one awfully sad direction, as the disease steadily erodes Midge\u2019s memories, personality and sense of self, while her loved ones gradually lose the woman they know. Louis-Dreyfus beautifully voices Midge in all her sliding states of consciousness, from the bright, empathetic protector that Sarah returns to in her own childhood memories, to the fragile, angry woman railing against a deterioration that she can\u2019t halt, to a foggy echo of her former self, sometimes recognizing the love surrounding her but not much else.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut for all the sorrow that marks and bruises \u201cTangles,\u201d it\u2019s not a depressing film \u2014 colored as it is by warmly detailed familial observation and bittersweet humor, as Midge\u2019s daughters and husband slowly figure out how to keep living in the midst of her dying. The tone of proceedings largely follows the zigs and zags of Sarah\u2019s own fraying mental health, sometimes plunging into nightmarish absurdism \u2014 an effective running gag sees the PA system on her many cross-country flights voicing her own more despairing thoughts \u2014 and sometimes breaking into practical clarity or wistful nostalgia. \u201cTangles\u201d is a film sensitively but not blandly attuned to the challenges of living with dementia, as well as those living alongside it \u2014 and the stray, special moments of emotional connection between those struggles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The distinctive visual storytelling of Canadian cartoonist Sarah Leavitt is deftly and stylishly transferred to the big screen…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":669583,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,5328,75,246799,337,246740],"class_list":["post-669582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-cannes-film-festival","tag-entertainment","tag-leah-nelson","tag-movies","tag-tangles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=669582"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669582\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/669583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=669582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=669582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=669582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}