Nimona review: This energetic fantasy film is a powerful queer story
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It's always an interesting experience to watch a movie that almost didn't exist. Nimona, the new animated fantasy film based on the comic by ND Stevenson, was in development for years at Blue Sky Studios, the animation house that brought us Ice Age and Spies In Disguise in years past. But after Disney bought Fox in 2019, the House of Mouse shuttered Blue Sky and scuttled Nimona — reportedly for being too gay. Thankfully, Annapurna and Netflix stepped in to save the project, and its June 30 release now comes as a fun finale to this year's Pride Month.
The title character of Nimona is a redheaded shape-shifter (Chloë Grace Moretz) who befriends outcast knight Sir Ballister Boldheart (Riz Ahmed) after the latter is framed for the murder of the queen (Lorraine Toussaint). Nimona essentially has the same superpower as Beast Boy from the Teen Titans, in that she can transform into any animal and that animal is always the same color (although for her it's pink instead of green). But the way Nimona talks about shape-shifting sounds a lot like overcoming gender dysphoria: "I feel worse if I don't do it, like my insides are itchy... then I shape-shift, and I'm free."
Stevenson wrote and drew the original comic years before coming out as a trans man, but the allegory is right there, and film directors Troy Quane and Nick Bruno (Spies In Disguise) expand it in resonant ways.
"And now you're a boy?" Ballister asks after Nimona transforms into a little kid for a scheme.
"I am today," she responds.
Netflix Sir Ballister Boldheart (Riz Ahmed) and Nimona (Chloe Grace Moretz) in 'Nimona.'
Nimona isn't the only queer character in this story, either. Although Ballister is reluctant to accept Nimona as his "sidekick," he has an even more complicated relationship with top knight Ambrosius Goldenloin (Eugene Lee Yang). The descendant of kingdom founder Gloreth, Ambrosius seems like everything Ballister is not: a noble scion instead of a promoted commoner, adorned in golden armor and floppy white hair in opposition to Ballister's "Black Knight" look. But despite the fact that Ambrosius cut off Ballister's arm amid the chaos of the queen's death, the two share a powerful connection, and it doesn't take long for them both to plainly refer to that as "love."
To replace his lost limb, Ballister has a very cool robot arm, because Nimona is a bit of a genre mashup. For the most part it's fantasy, set in a kingdom ruled over by a monarch and protected by knights with swords and armor. But those swords are more like lightsabers, the knights ride hovercrafts instead of horses, and the walls are mounted with laser cannons rather than trebuchets.
But more meaningful than that is the way that Nimona interrogates the tropes of classic fantasy stories. Nimona is an incredibly fun character who is animated very expressively even in her regular human-ish form, and energetically voiced by Moretz, but by the tropes of Arthurian-style romances, she could only be classified as a "monster." The story admiringly delves into how such monsters are in fact created by a society that refuses to accept their differences.
Nimona peaks with an incredible sequence where the shape-shifter shows off the full range of her powers. In order to break Ballister out of jail, she barrels through a castle as a rhinoceros, an ostrich, and — most hilariously of all — a gigantic pink whale. Shortly after, when the odd couple briefly thinks they have triumphed over their enemies, a dance party ensues in which Nimona takes the form of a shark with sunglasses. It's awesome.
Netflix Nimona (Chloe Grace Moretz) in 'Nimona.'
Alas, the imagination and creativity on display in those scenes peters off a bit in the second half of the film. Nimona's 99-minute runtime is refreshing in some ways, especially on a streaming service where both movies and TV shows are usually bloated, but it also leads to compression. Major aspects of world-building get hand-waved in ways that raise more questions than answers (such as: is Nimona the only such being? How do their powers correlate with extended lifespan?) and the rapid-fire shape-changes are eventually replaced by more monolithic transformations. There are plot reasons for that, but it's still less fun to watch. And in a story that doesn't flinch away from the social prejudices that can harm both non-binary and non-white people, it would be nice to see the villainous purveyors of hierarchy get a little more cathartic comeuppance than they ultimately do.
Still, it feels like a miracle that Nimona was finished and can be seen on such an accessible platform where it sits comfortably alongside Stevenson's She-Ra and the Princesses of Power series, another fun-as-hell animated queer story that blends fantasy and sci-fi. While Disney continues to translate its animated classics into live-action and Pixar puts out subpar fare, Nimona's release on Netflix continues 2023's record as a strong year for animation from lesser-known creators and studios. Grade: B+
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