In Waves Could Be Netflix’s Boldest Adult-Animation Test Yet

What if the most important thing about In Waves is not that it is animated, but that Netflix can persuade audiences to treat it like a serious drama? That is the wager behind this surf-set love story: move animation away from the children’s aisle, through the festival circuit, and into the awards conversation. The risk is that prestige can become a very elegant form of invisibility once a film arrives on a streaming service.

Directed by Phuong Mai Nguyen, In Waves follows AJ, a reserved Los Angeles high school student who draws and skateboards, and Kristen, a passionate surfer. Their romance is transformed by Kristen’s illness, while the film’s emotional world is built around love, grief, friendship, family and the ocean. The story is adapted from AJ Dungo’s autobiographical graphic novel, published in 2019, and was inspired by Dungo’s real-life relationship, as Deadline reports.

The film already has the kind of credentials that make awards attention plausible. It opened Cannes Critics’ Week in May, was selected for Annecy and TIFF, and is scheduled to open the 30th American French Film Festival in Los Angeles on November 3, 2026. In France, it opened in theaters on July 1, while the U.S. festival listing gives Netflix’s release window as December 2026. Variety details the Los Angeles festival booking. The film’s festival trajectory could give Netflix a platform for an Oscars campaign, but that remains an editorial possibility—not a documented studio strategy.

In Waves makes animation’s emotional argument without apologizing for it

The premise could easily have produced sentimental prestige bait: young love, serious illness, California sunlight and waves arranged into a reliable tearjerker. What makes the project more interesting is the decision to use animation not as decorative packaging, but as a way to approach illness and mourning indirectly. The film’s production history describes a hybrid of 2D and 3D animation, with a textured 2D finish and a technical pipeline developed in Blender to create the ocean and surfing sequences.

That choice matters. Live action often treats illness as a demand for realism; animation can turn memory, fear and emotional dislocation into visual space. The ocean can be vast without being merely photorealistic, and grief can become a change in color, rhythm or movement rather than another close-up designed to force a reaction. We think that gives In Waves a genuine artistic reason to exist as animation.

Nguyen also appears to be resisting a literal translation of the source material. The film uses brighter, more saturated colors than Dungo’s sepia-and-blue graphic memoir, expands the family relationships, and reduces the book’s extensive surfing history. Those changes suggest a film seeking its own emotional language rather than treating the graphic novel as an illustrated screenplay. That is exactly the sort of authorship that can make a festival film stand out.

Festival prestige is useful only if Netflix turns it into an event

The festival résumé is impressive on paper: Cannes Critics’ Week, Annecy, TIFF and now the American French Film Festival. But festival credibility is not the same thing as public awareness. A film can be welcomed by programmers, admired by critics and still arrive on a platform with no cultural footprint beyond a small circle of animation devotees.

That is the central contradiction of Netflix’s position. Streaming gives In Waves a potentially enormous home, but the catalog also flattens distinctions. A film with a Cannes opening can sit beside hundreds of other recommendations, waiting for an algorithm to explain why it deserves attention. If Netflix wants adult audiences to see this as a cinematic drama, it has to market the film with the seriousness of one: not as “an animated movie,” but as a specific love story with a distinctive director, a recognizable artistic identity and a reason to watch now.

The November 3 festival opening in Los Angeles offers a useful bridge between theatrical culture and streaming reach. Yet the December U.S. release window creates a narrow opportunity. The campaign must make the film feel timely before the holiday glut and before awards conversation becomes dominated by louder, more familiar contenders. Our view is that a quiet release would undersell the very argument In Waves is capable of making.

The adult-animation test is bigger than one awards campaign

Animation has never lacked emotional range; it has lacked consistent industrial confidence in adult audiences. Projects such as In Waves are often asked to prove, in a single release, that a non-child-focused animated film can be artistically ambitious, emotionally difficult and commercially legible. That is an unfair burden, but Netflix is well positioned to carry it because its platform can connect a French-Belgian production to viewers who might never encounter it through a conventional theatrical rollout.

Still, reach is not the same as discovery. Adult viewers need a reason to choose the film over live-action dramas, and animation fans need to know that this is not simply a children’s title with a sadder premise. The campaign should embrace the tension: this is a coming-of-age romance, a story about serious illness and a film whose visual design is inseparable from its subject. Hiding the animation would be a mistake; using it as the hook without explaining the drama would be another.

The likely winner here is not an awards campaign by itself, but the possibility of changing how the platform frames animated cinema. If In Waves gets a real push, it could become a model for treating animation as filmmaker-led drama. If it is quietly deposited in the catalog, its festival journey will look less like a launchpad than a preface no one reads.

The verdict: In Waves is worth watching for the ambition behind its form as much as for its awards prospects. Netflix should campaign it boldly, and adult viewers should seek it out deliberately when it arrives in December 2026. This is precisely the kind of film that needs an audience before the algorithm decides it has one.