{"id":621583,"date":"2026-09-11T16:30:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-11T16:30:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/621583\/"},"modified":"2026-09-11T16:30:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-11T16:30:12","slug":"julian-director-louise-bagnall-on-animation-identity-and-family","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/621583\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Juli\u00e1n’ Director Louise Bagnall on Animation, Identity and Family"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Cartoon Saloon animator Louise Bagnall<\/a> makes her feature directorial debut with \u201cJuli\u00e1n,\u201d based on the children\u2019s book \u201cJuli\u00e1n Is a Mermaid\u201d 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 Salda\u00f1a is one of the executive producers, while Film New Europe is handling international sales; CAA Film Sales has U.S.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe source material and the film are very sophisticated in probing familial tension, melancholic yearnings and bullying.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cCertainly 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 Juli\u00e1n\u2019s own heritage,\u201d says Bagnall, who has an Oscar nomination for animated short \u201cLate Afternoon.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tShe notes that the film\u2019s screenwriter, Juliany Taveres, \u201cbrought so much to the film in terms of specificity \u2014 they\u2019re from Brooklyn\u201d while co-director (with Mark Mullery) Guillaume Lorin grew up in the Caribbean.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cJuli\u00e1n\u201d is joyous and colorful \u2014 as you would expect of a film that celebrates Latin culture as well as the flora and fauna of the sea, and mermaids.<\/p>\n

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\u201cSo 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,\u201d she says. \u201cI thought that the medium of animation could actually do a wonderful job telling that story.\u201d<\/p>\n

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And while Juli\u00e1n\u2019s imagination and dream of being a mermaid drives the story, there is tension with his grandmother \u2014 her own memories of her life in the DR before she came to the U.S. have been buried. Juli\u00e1n is a catalyst for \u201cher own understanding of who she is and her own kind of loss,\u201d says Bagnall. She also embraces joy in the end and is able to \u201cre-embrace a part of herself and a part of her life that she thought was gone.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThat heritage and the grit of Brooklyn collide onscreen in colors and sounds. \u201cIt 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\u2019s beautiful, and I think that again ties back to the themes of the film, and how we aren\u2019t all perfect, but we can make the most of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Juli\u00e1n\u2019s imagination lends itself to magical realism: swimming in the sea with creatures and when the spell is broken, there\u2019s water all over the apartment. There\u2019s several charming scenes that exude the pure joy of a 7-year-old\u2019s mind.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIn this day and the age of AI, we still actually make a lot of our work on paper,\u201d says Bagnall. \u201cNow, we do the animation on the computer, but it\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u201cJuli\u00e1n\u201d 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cartoon Saloon animator Louise Bagnall makes her feature directorial debut with \u201cJuli\u00e1n,\u201d based on the children\u2019s book \u201cJuli\u00e1n…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":621584,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[93,61,60,263936,270,1998],"class_list":["post-621583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-louise-bagnall","tag-movies","tag-toronto-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=621583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621583\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/621584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=621583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=621583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=621583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}