A new trailer for a drawn love story
Netflix has released the official trailer for In Waves, Phuong Mai Nguyen's animated adaptation of AJ Dungo's graphic memoir. Will Sharpe voices AJ and Stephanie Hsu voices Kristen. The film reaches Netflix on December 11; TheWrap reports a select theatrical release beginning November 27.
The official Netflix premise introduces a reserved teenager drawn to skateboarding and drawing, and a young woman who loves surfing. As their relationship develops, Kristen brings AJ into the ocean. A sudden illness tests the life they are beginning to imagine together. The trailer is available from Netflix's verified YouTube channel.
Those two activities give the adaptation a particularly clear reason to use animation. Drawing holds a moment still; surfing depends on responding to a surface that will not stop changing. A romance built around both can move between preservation and surrender. The form has an opportunity to express that tension through time, movement and the relation between a figure and the space around it.
This is a more specific prospect than the general promise of an emotional animated film. A drawn character can share the visual language of the memories being preserved. Water can make that language move. The adaptation does not need to treat illustration as a decorative layer over a conventional live-action story; it can make the act of remembering part of how the story is told.
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Learning another person's activity can reveal intimacy without a direct declaration. A beginner has to accept instruction, tolerate embarrassment and trust somebody else's judgment. The experienced partner has to decide when to explain and when to let the other person try. These are small negotiations, but they can show how a relationship works more persuasively than a speech about mutual support.
Surfing makes those negotiations physical. Two people may enter the same water without experiencing it in the same way. Confidence, hesitation and pleasure can coexist inside one shared outing. An animated film can shift its emphasis between them through timing and scale: a body briefly dwarfed by a wave, a pause before movement, a release of speed after uncertainty.
The illness in the premise changes the value of that shared activity. A place associated with possibility can acquire the weight of time. The challenge is to preserve ordinary pleasure rather than making every early moment announce later sorrow. Joy needs to be allowed a present of its own. Otherwise the relationship becomes important only because of what may happen to it.
That is also where friends and community can matter. Romance becomes narrower when the couple seem to exist only for each other's emotional development. A shared world gives a relationship texture: familiar places, competing plans, people who remember the two separately. The ocean can be a meeting place within that world instead of a beautiful backdrop reserved exclusively for the central pair.
A memoir becomes movement
Nguyen's film is her feature debut, and Netflix identifies the underlying book as autobiographical. That makes the movement between a person's drawing practice and an animated representation of his experience especially pertinent. The adaptation begins from somebody already using images to give shape to a life.
Animation can make a memory coherent without making it look mechanically complete. A simplified space may direct attention to a gesture. A transition can connect places through feeling rather than a literal journey between them. Such choices allow a film to retain the selective quality of recollection while giving viewers a continuous experience.
The voices have a related task. Sharpe and Hsu need to make the relationship audible in changing degrees of ease, curiosity and familiarity. A line delivered to a new acquaintance has a different weight after a shared routine develops. Those shifts can establish intimacy without asking the dialogue to explain every change in feeling.
The new trailer brings In Waves closer to a wider audience, but the strongest attraction is already visible in its premise and form. A person who draws meets somebody who teaches him to move with water. Their connection offers animation a language for love as something both lived and preserved, with neither half reducing the other to a neat lesson.