In Waves

AJ Dungo's 2019 graphic memoir In Waves did something unusual for a book about grief: it braided his girlfriend Kristen's cancer into a history of Hawaiian surfing and the life of Duke Kahanamoku, so that private loss and a century of ocean culture shared the same pages. Phuong Mai Nguyen's animated adaptation keeps that architecture. It is a French-American co-production, animated largely at Gao Shan Pictures, and it treats surfing and drawing not as backdrop but as the two languages its leads use when words fail.

The film went out in French theaters on July 1, 2026, with Rio Vega and Lyna Khoudri voicing the leads. Netflix's global version, arriving December 11, 2026, recasts the roles in English with Stephanie Hsu and Will Sharpe. That double-cast approach is standard for European animation co-productions, but it means the film effectively has two performances of the same couple, and the Netflix cut is the one most viewers will meet first.

Nguyen came up through French animation, and she directs with a light hand. The courtship sequences let the linework loosen and the palette warm; the illness sequences pull the camera back and hold still. Robin Coudert and Marylou Mayniel's score does a lot of the emotional lifting without pushing. At 91 minutes, it is a small film that trusts silence. [edit]

Los Angeles, in that particular sun that makes everything look slightly overexposed. AJ is a teenager who moves through the city on a skateboard with a sketchbook in his bag. He draws constantly, not because he has ambitions about it but because drawing is how he thinks. Faces, hands, the geometry of a street corner, the way light falls on a wall. He is shy in the way that reads as aloof until you get close enough to see him watching. Skateboarding gives him motion without conversation. He is not a boy who announces himself.

Kristen is his opposite in temperament and his mirror in obsession. She surfs. Not casually, not as a summer thing, but as the organizing principle of her days. The paddle out, the long wait, the read of the water, the drop. She is the kind of surfer who checks the swell report before she checks her phone. The film spends time with each of them separately before it ever puts them in the same frame, and that patience pays off. By the time they meet, you already know what each of them is risking by letting someone else in.

They meet and it is immediate. The film treats first love as a genuine rupture rather than a cute contrivance, the sense that a shared future has gone from hypothetical to obvious in the space of a few weeks. There are long sequences of them together, on the boardwalk and in the water, AJ drawing Kristen while she waxes a board, Kristen teaching AJ the rhythms of the surf, the two of them building a private vocabulary. The animation changes register here. The palette warms. The linework loosens. The film lets itself be happy for a while, and that happiness is doing structural work, because everything after it has to be measured against it.

Then Kristen gets a terminal diagnosis. The story pivots, but not into melodrama. It goes quieter. The central question becomes how two young people, one of whom is dying, negotiate care and honesty and the future they had already started to assume. AJ's instinct is to document, to draw, to try to fix Kristen on the page so she cannot be lost. Kristen's instinct is to stay in the water for as long as her body allows, and to keep the illness from swallowing the person she was before it. The film follows them through treatment and through the strain it puts on the people around them, including Francisco and Jeff and the drawing teacher who anchors AJ's artistic life. Surfing and drawing stay the twin languages of the movie, the two ways these characters know how to say what they cannot say out loud.

The narrative builds toward a point where the water is no longer safely available to Kristen, and where AJ has to decide what his drawing is actually for. The film stops short of its final movement here; what happens at the end is addressed in the spoiler section below.[edit]