When Phuong Mai Nguyen first landed in Southern California, she was struck by the sunshine. The Vietnamese-French filmmaker had signed on to direct an animated adaptation of In Waves, AJ Dungo’s hit 2019 graphic memoir, and traveled across the Atlantic to meet her subject — and immerse herself in his world. “It’s weird because in France we don’t have that kind of lighting all the time — now it’s springtime, but we still have gray skies,” she says. “The light [in Los Angeles] was amazing.”

You can feel that direct inspiration all over In Waves, Nguyen’s feature debut, working off of a screenplay by Fanny Burdino and Samuel Doux. Expanding on the visual style of the original book, the movie draws heavily from nature to tell the bittersweet love story between teenagers AJ and Kristen, whose bond is strengthened by a shared love of surfing. 

The water is its own character here, in its adventure and natural beauty and stormy volatility. Indeed, the aquatic motif changes shape as Kristen battles terminal cancer. “For AJ, the way to overcome a loss is being in the water — it’s really a beautiful metaphor for life and being humble in the face of nature and also in this world,” Nguyen says. 

When she first met with Dungo, Nguyen was nervous about how he’d react to her distinct, outsider’s visual take on the milieu. But the author was immediately taken with her vision. “They’re adding a whole new dimension to this and they’re all way better artists than I am,” Dungo says of Nguyen and her team. “The amount of work and love that they poured into it is more than I could have imagined.” 

The movie also removes the bulk of the narration of the memoir, which often reads like a tone poem, and adds in a ton of dialogue. Kristen, for instance, is more of a memory in Dungo’s book and only has one line. Here she speaks regularly, with Dungo having supplied anecdotes about her to help inform an authentic characterization.

“They were mining my experience, my family life, my friends, asking, ‘What was Kristen like?’ — they wanted more background,” Dungo says. “It was interesting to see your own history reflected back to you through someone else’s lens, but still capturing the deep emotions and the pain and the joy in the way they did.” When she came to California and Dungo gave her the In Waves tour, Nguyen recalls noticing how far Kristen’s hospital was from the beach. “It was interesting in a symbolic way because she was very attracted to oceans and the waves — that was her passion, and she was geographically removed from that,” Nguyen says. “That gave me a lot of ideas for staging.”

Alternately naturalistic and dreamlike, In Waves will open Cannes Critics Week at the Cannes Film Festival — the first animated movie in history to do so. “We feel like we are the ugly duck in the film industry — in the last maybe 10 years, there weren’t a lot of animated movies selected,” Nguyen says. “So being the opening film, I think, is good for the animation industry. We are very happy and overwhelmed.”