Nicolas Athané and Marco Nguyen‘s raunchy, funny animated feature debut “Jim Queen” is like an AIDS allegory where the transmissible disease is instead straightness — and it’s a film that offers a crash course in gay sexual culture that may be only meaningful to those already familiar with it. Maybe that’s OK.
In this simplistically animated film’s version of gay Paris, a disease called “heterosis” is plaguing the city’s gyms, sex clubs, and nightlife. It’s a disease where, for sex-positive Insta-famous influencer Jim Parfait (voiced by Alex Ramirès), the sudden prolapsing of his 24-pack of abs — abs cultivated via a daily intake of 2kg of protein and surely so much sadness and tears along the way — might as well be a death sentence. And it’s the first sign of this new strain of STI taking hold, the way lesions would indicate a certain other disease that came to hit Paris in the 1980s, of the gay male population.
Written by Athané and Nguyen with co-writer Simon Balteaux, “Jim Queen” is a satire where the potshots will feel familiar and even basic to anyone who’s lived them or lives them every day. But in a world where gay representation at all is still on a dearth onscreen — and especially in mainstream animation — the satire isn’t unwelcome. It’s just not very insightful or illuminating, though for gay audiences outside of France, they may notice how the world depicted here is a carbon copy of, say, West Hollywood or Hell’s Kitchen. The sexual hierarchies are the same. But we aren’t reading Foucault here; “Jim Queen” is meant to be a divergent blast of entertainment.
Those rigid sexual hierachies mean that closeted, pure-hearted twink like Lucien (Jérémy Gillet), who is obsessed with Jim Parfait, would in an ordinary world have no chance with Jim Parfait. He’s the son of the city’s Thatcher-esque prime minister Christine Bayer (Elisabeth Wiener). The elected official has no idea about the walk-in closet of sex toys and other gay paraphernalia assembled in his bedroom around a shrine to Jim Parfait, who has 20 million followers and is the eye of everyone at the Temple Gym and PowerBoyz warehouse. In other words, worlds apart from the one in which Lucien is ensconced.
Outside his ivory tower, the heterosis disease is raging on, turning men whose appetites normally lay only in prostate orgasms, poppers, all-night benders, and chemsex into the kind of people who suddenly have an affection for a church wedding. Or suddenly have a preternatural understanding of the ins and outs of soccer. One by one, it’s taking the gay male community of Paris down. Even Lady Gaga had to cancel her concert.
The STD affecting Jim and all his cohorts also forces them to confront their own shallowness and shame. When Jim catches an illicit word that a nefarious Dr. Ragoult has a cure known as “chloroqueer” to stop the disease’s relentlessness, one that may involve a horrifically invasive procedure on a young twink such as Lucien, Jim hatches a plan.
But it’s one thrown off by various complications, including the obvious romance bubbling between Jim and Lucien, and the sensible judgment cast by Jim’s best friend Nina (Shirley Souagnon) on his increasingly straight decision-making, as it was when he was full-on gay. He’s spent a lifetime on top of the gay food chain, and now, divested of his followers and his abs, who is he really when stripped of everything that defined him?
“Jim Queen” is filled with scalding gags about gay tribes, steroid and drug use, and other things that will resonate with the target audience, which is likely the film’s only audience. Various nemeses and side characters enter the fray, from Jim’s archenemy (and also Insta-famous) Pavel to the scally with a sneaker-sniffing fetish who guides Jim and Lucien to their next destination. A destination where acts of body horror are about to be done to Lucien against his will to find the remedy for the extinction of heterosexuality. A drag queen named Glamydia (Harald Marlot) also provides comic wisdom on the film’s fast-moving animated journey, which is always entertaining if uninspired.
European studio Bobbypills’s retro animation style — all 2D but popped with color, and little depth to the frame — makes “Jim Queen” feel flung from another era despite its bracingly modern and very niche satire. Inevitably and predictably, the film turns into a celebratory coming-out story — and one in which prostate orgasms become the ultimate savior for a vastly heterosexualizing community. “Jim Queen” along the way becomes a kind of I Spy for gay tropes that those in the audience will laugh at and recognize, but won’t be left to feel much about after gay humanity has been saved.
Grade: C+
“Jim Queen” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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