Cannes 2026- Jim Queen: Deliciously obscene and joyfully regressive (review)

The Bobbypills studio goes full length with a gay fable about a virus that makes you straight. Raw, funny and politically charged animated comedy: what if pop was a weapon of mass resistance?

Jim, gay icon and glory of Parisian gyms, contracts Heterosis and loses everything: his abs, his aura, his followers. If the virus spreads, he might even end up kissing a girl – the anxiety! Helped by Lucien, a young gay who has not yet come out, Jim sets off in search of the antidote. One certainty: you hold the Queer Palm there. But Jim Queen is a little more than that. Bobbypills (the production company to which we owe the animated series Les Kassos, Peepoodo or the very queer Crisis Jung) is moving on to a feature film. And the studio has decided not to deny its signature (trash and satirical) however: Christine Bayer is a homophobic minister (Boutin plus the lab at the origin of the contaminated blood scandal: the name is a program), we discover an anti-homo brigade renamed Gaystapo, drag queens as sentinels or rotten pharmaceutical labs…

Don’t go away: if it smacks of an activist leaflet, the film never gets caught up in its activist specifications. Firstly because the writing and direction favor the impact and crudeness of gags that Plympton would not have denied (the crazy sequence in the filthy lab). But above all because there is emotion. The heart of the film is as much Jim’s dirty jokes as the journey of Lucien, a young gay man still in hiding, who learns to take responsibility by accompanying his fallen idol. And the elastic animation, obscene and joyfully regressive, draws with delight from American adult cartoons and from a French tradition which is finally coming to terms with itself. Morality: kitsch and dirty laughter can still be weapons of liberation. And in the face of reactionary regression, it is perhaps better to have a gaydar and an unbridled cartoon than a sad and poorly designed leaflet.

By Marco Nguyen and Nicolas Athané. Duration: 1h20. Released June 19, 2026