Cartoon Saloon’s New Film ‘Julián,’ Completed with Colored Pencils and Watercolors

Cartoon Saloon’s Julián follows a boy spending summer with his grandmother in Brooklyn as he discovers his Caribbean heritage and that he is a mermaid. Its backgrounds use colored pencils and markers

Cartoon Saloon’s feature animation *Julián* tells the story of a boy who spends the summer in Brooklyn with a grandmother he has never met. After encountering her apartment, where objects are piled up like treasures, and a Caribbean community, he begins to accept that he is a mermaid. Based on Jessica Love’s picture book *Julián Is a Mermaid*, it is Louise Bagnall’s feature directorial debut and had its world premiere at the 2026 Annecy International Animation Film Festival.

What sets the film apart is that it does not simply replicate the watercolor-and-gouache texture of the original picture book. Bagnall believed that if the painterly texture stood out too strongly on screen, it could interfere with cinematic immersion, so she retained the liveliness of the lines while choosing colored pencils and markers for the background rendering. These are also tools found in Julián’s pencil case, connecting the child’s way of seeing the city to the materials themselves.

The colors do not reduce New York’s summer to a merely hot landscape. The sun-bleached streets use bright, earthy tones, while the grandmother’s apartment is filled with jewel-like colors such as emerald, purple, and hot pink. For magical moments, deep blues and teals alter the texture of scenes in which Julián explores his inner self and deeper roots.

The Coney Island Mermaid Parade is where this visual language expands most dramatically. Instead of repeatedly placing generic crowd figures, the production team designed the characters shot by shot and used flags and patterned fabrics to create the parade’s density and movement. Combining hand-drawn animation with Moho-based rigging was a way to fill the screen with the vitality of a community within the production conditions of an independent feature.