Name: Tad and The Magic Lamp
Director: Enrique Gato
Genre: Animation, Comedy, Family
Released: 2026-09-11T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 94 min
Cast: Óscar Barberán, Michelle Jenner, Luis Posada, Joseph Balderrama, Trevor White

Tad Stones is a joke about wanting to be someone else, a small-town builder who dresses like Indiana Jones and keeps falling into the adventures he only meant to daydream about. The fourth film in Enrique Gato’s Spanish animated series keeps the fedora and the pratfalls, then turns the wish itself into the plot.

The setup is domestic before it is fantastical. Tad and the archaeologist Sara are raising a small daughter, and Momia, the bandaged, self-regarding mummy who has trailed the crew since the first film, cannot bear being upstaged by a toddler. A lamp surfaces during a family trip to London. He wishes himself back to the years when he was adored, and the rest of the film is a scramble to catch him before the change hardens into history.

The casting is continuity, which for this series is the point. Óscar Barberán has voiced Tad from the beginning, Michelle Jenner returns as Sara Lavrof, and Luis Posada again gives Momia the wounded vanity that makes him the most reliable engine in the franchise. For English-language territories the character is renamed Tad Stones and revoiced, with Trevor White in the lead and Joseph Balderrama among the ensemble, a distributor habit the films have carried since they first traveled abroad.

Gato grew this world out of a short film that won a Goya, then built it into Spain’s most exportable animation brand. His instincts have not moved: rounded caricature, brisk slapstick, a palette that resets with each location. The first feature turned an €8 million budget into a €45 million hit; the second took the Goya for best animated film. What shifts here is the structure. Where the earlier films chased an object, a papyrus, King Midas’s necklace, an emerald tablet, this one chases a mistake, which lets the animators redraw the same faces across eras and continents rather than across one more ruin.

Scale is the quiet argument for a fourth outing. The series has become a dependable European earner and a real export, the rare Spanish animation that travels on its own name, and Paramount now handles the international rollout. That reach is why the renaming matters. The same film ships as Tadeo Jones at home and as Tad Stones almost everywhere else, tuned market by market so the comedy lands in a dub rather than a subtitle.

The itinerary carries the picture. A wish that rewrites time lets it travel, from Peru to Greece to a version of the Middle East filtered through the Arabian Nights and down into Ali Baba’s cave, and each stop is a change of set and light more than a change of stakes. This is world-tour animation, built to read in any language, and the design leans on silhouette and colour to land gags that owe nothing to dialogue. The London sequence, grey stone against the crew’s primary-colour costumes, is the cleanest image the trailer offers.

Design is where the film earns its keep. The series has always known what it is, broad silhouettes, elastic faces, comic timing carried in the eyes and eyebrows more than in the writing. The new toddler hands the animators a fresh register, small and round against the crew’s angular adults, and the film keeps cutting its wide adventure geography against that domestic scale. The mummy stays the best-drawn thing in it, a bundle of bandages and insecurity whose every slight shows in posture. None of it needs a big screen, exactly, but the colour is calibrated for one, and the grey of London exists mostly to make the desert golds that follow look richer.

What the film does not do is complicate its own formula. A jealous sidekick and a magic object are a fourth variation on a template that has always worked, and the time-travel device, convenient and reversible, asks nothing permanent of anyone. The domestic frame, a couple raising a child, hints at a maturity the slapstick then declines to explore. Younger viewers will not mind. The parents in the row behind them may recognise the loop.

Tad and his friends in Enrique Gato animated film Tad and the Magic Lamp 2026 — Tad and the crew in the animated Tad and the Magic Lamp (2026)

The film is directed by Enrique Gato and produced through Lightbox Animation Studios with Telecinco Cinema, Ikiru Films and Movistar Plus+, the studio grouping that has carried the series throughout. The Spanish voice cast is led by Barberán, Jenner and Posada, and the international version is fronted by Trevor White. It sits where the franchise has always sat, animation built for families with a comic spine.

Tad and the Magic Lamp, released in Spain as Tadeo Jones y la lámpara maravillosa, has opened in Spanish cinemas and rolls out internationally through Paramount Pictures, reaching UK screens as Tad Jones and the Magic Lamp on September 11, part of a rollout that carries the film across more than forty countries into the autumn. It runs 94 minutes and is pitched at family audiences.