The first trailer for Tangles arrived this week, and with it the strangest awards contender of the season moved from festival secret to public movie. Tangles is a hand-drawn, black-and-white animated feature about a daughter who goes home to care for her mother as Alzheimer’s disease takes her memory. It is directed by Leah Nelson, adapted from Sarah Leavitt’s 2010 graphic memoir Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me, and it opens in limited release on January 15, 2027, expanding nationwide on January 22, after an Oscar-qualifying run planned for the end of this year.
The film follows Sarah, a young illustrator who has built her life in San Francisco, as she travels back to her family in Maine, where her mother, Midge, a sharp and funny woman, is beginning to disappear into early-onset Alzheimer’s. Nelson, co-founder of the Vancouver studio Giant Ant, making her feature directing debut, shot nothing and recorded everything: the animation is drawn by hand, in black and white, and the story is carried entirely by voices.
That is where Seth Rogen comes in. Rogen and his wife, Lauren Miller Rogen, are producers on the film through Point Grey Pictures and her Lylas Pictures, and Rogen also voices a supporting role. The connection is not a vanity credit. Miller Rogen’s mother, Adele, was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s at 57, and the couple founded the nonprofit Hilarity for Charity in 2012, years before most of Hollywood would say the word Alzheimer’s out loud. They met Nelson and Leavitt at an Alzheimer’s charity event and stayed attached to the adaptation as it was developed and financed over time. The project took roughly ten years to reach the screen.
At the film’s Cannes premiere in May, in the festival’s Special Screenings section, Rogen cried through it. “I’ve seen the movie, obviously, a lot of times,” he told People afterward. “But that was the first time I’ve seen it not on my laptop computer with Lauren sitting beside me in our living room. I’m just glad the movie is effective and works. We’ve been working on it for like 10 years. To watch it with a big group of people is a very lovely feeling.” The premiere ended in a standing ovation, and the film left Cannes with nominations for the Camèra d’Or and the Queer Palm and a growing reputation as one of the year’s defining animated features.
Speaking at the Middleburg Film Festival this month, Rogen explained why a hand-drawn film about memory loss needed to look the way it does, arguing that animation lets the story do things live action cannot, including bringing the disease itself into the room visually, and that his job as a producer was to trust the filmmakers’ instincts over his own. He has described the film as “the embodiment of sadness and joy, swirling together in unexpected ways,” which matches his own family’s experience: the laughter in Tangles is not relief from the grief, it is part of the same memory.
For actors, the cast is the story underneath the story. Julia Louis-Dreyfus voices Midge, playing a woman of formidable wit as the wit is taken from her, line by line. Abbi Jacobson voices Sarah, carrying the film’s point of view. Bryan Cranston plays Sarah’s father, Rob, Beanie Feldstein plays her sister, Hannah, and Samira Wiley plays Donimo, the woman Sarah is falling for back in San Francisco, with Pamela Adlon, Sarah Silverman, Wanda Sykes and Bowen Yang rounding out the ensemble. Nelson insisted the cast record together, in the same room, rather than in the isolated booth sessions animated films usually rely on, so the family in the booth would sound like a family. You can hear the decision in the trailer: these people interrupt, overlap and finish each other, the way relatives do.
Tangles is 102 minutes, with a score by Dan Romer, and will be released by the Independent Film Company. Early festival reviews have singled out the voice work, and the film is already being discussed as a serious contender for Best Animated Feature. Whatever happens in awards season, it has already done the harder thing: it took a subject families hide from, a form most studios reserve for children, and a decade of patience from two producers who had every reason to make it and no commercial reason at all, and turned them into the movie everyone at Cannes was crying about.
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