The story of Nimona , the groundbreaking animated film that refused to die
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Netflix Nimona (Chloë Grace Moretz) transforms into a whale to escape the Institute with Ballister Blackheart (Riz Ahmed)
ND Stevenson has long been fascinated by shapeshifters. He had a particular affinity for Zam Wesell, a changeling assassin in 2002's Star Wars: Attack of the Clones that most people forget about. "I just wanted to see more of the shapeshifting," Stevenson, the creator of Netflix's hit series She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, tells EW. "I wanted to know how far you could go with that. If you could turn into any person, what does that mean?"
It was in high school in South Carolina where he would start to sketch his own shapeshifter, Nimona. Over the years, the character would begin to take form: pink, full-bodied, partly shaved head. She was "punk," a "rebel," and "a total rulebreaker," Stevenson remembers of those early concepts. "I started thinking a lot about the merging of a futuristic world with a medieval aesthetic," he says. "My initial idea was sort of a punk Joan of Arc character."
"In hindsight, my lifelong obsession with shapeshifters has a pretty obvious conclusion," Stevenson notes. The creative came out as nonbinary in July 2020, and transmasculine and bi-gender in March 2021. "We all feel the pressure to be something, and [Nimona] is the fantasy of breaking free of that, of choosing who she is in any given moment and then constantly changing and constantly staying one step ahead." It's why, when Stevenson first put Nimona out as the lead of the character's own webcomic in 2012, he didn't imagine such a specific and personal story would garner an audience beyond the "very close-knit group" of fans on Tumblr. But today, as Netflix prepares to release the long-awaited movie adaptation of the now-award-winning Nimona this month, he looks back on the long, tumultuous journey and feels euphoric.
"I didn't know what the road ahead would look like, but at the time it was that feeling of, 'Well, let's follow this as far as it goes and see what happens,'" Stevenson reflects. "Never could I have guessed what would've happened."
Who is Nimona?
Netflix Riz Ahmed's Ballister and Chloë Grace Moretz's Nimona
Troy Quane and Nick Bruno, the directors behind Spies in Disguise who would turn Nimona into an animated feature film, remember why the original webcomic, which was later published by HarperCollins as a graphic novel, made such an impact. "It was this really funny, irreverent love letter to anybody who's ever felt misunderstood and different within their own kingdom," Bruno says.
"It's funny, it's tragic, it's all these things that somehow hit you on all these different levels," Quane adds. "And it's messy, which I think is what I really loved about it. It represented a lot of reality in that way."
Nimona is a shapeshifter determined to be a supervillain's sidekick. She has her heart set on Ballister Blackheart, once a glorified knight of the Institution who has since been banished from the order. He's not really a villain, as much as he tries to be. He's just jilted: He lost his arm in a joust against the current Institution's champion, Ambrosius Goldenloin. Ballister is now determined to prove to the kingdom that their sworn protectors aren't as noble as they appear — and Nimona, a true anarchist with impeccable comedic timing, aims to push him toward mayhem as often as possible.
It wasn't just the amusing mix of high-tech sci-fi and medieval magic that resonated with so many readers, when Stevenson first released Nimona online in 2012. It was the subtext. Stevenson is open about the shapeshifting concept acting as a cipher for his own journey with gender, but it was also heavily implied in the comic that Ballister and Ambrosius had been way more than friends prior to their arm-severing fallout. Then there's Nimona herself. "I grew up not liking female characters," Stevenson says. "They were just not written as well as the male characters. If people would write a good female character, then I'd like her." Stevenson had to "deprogram" his own bias against female characters because of that unfortunate trend, while also creating the kind of protagonist he wanted to see.
Nimona doesn't look like the typical heroines of the time. Physically, there are more curves and meat on her bones than any Disney princess. And she certainly doesn't act like the typical heroine. "People were uncomfortable when it wasn't this on-a-pedestal, perfect, beautiful, good character," Stevenson continues. "That was something I wanted to challenge going into this."
Once HarperCollins published the series as a graphic novel in 2015, Nimona became a National Book Award finalist and an Eisner Award nominee the same year, and later an Eisner Award winner in 2016. Stevenson remembers LeVar Burton, Mr. Reading Rainbow himself, moderating a live reading of Nimona in New York City for local school kids. That's when he knew the story was having a much wider impact than he imagined.
"To see that this was not only something they were reading in school but that they were engaging with it," he recalls, "they were thinking about it, they had questions, they wanted to know about the world and the characters and what was happening — that was the moment of realizing this was something that had grown past me and past Tumblr and past my own world."
Changing it up
Netflix Ballister and Nimona come face to face with Ambrosius Goldenloin (Eugene Lee Yang)
Quane and Bruno first heard about Nimona, the movie, while working at Blue Sky, the now-shuttered animation studio behind Ice Age and the first home for the film. It wasn't something they could ignore. Everyone seemed to be talking about it after the studio acquired it.
"We were both working on Spies in Disguise," Quane remembers. "They put together this little teaser piece that they were playing in the theater at the studio. We sat down and were like, 'Oh s---! This looks incredible.' But then the more people you started to talk to you, the more you realized it went so much further."
"You kept hearing people say how important this movie could be, because it is for all those who've ever felt misunderstood, though it has themes that go even more specific than that," Bruno adds. "The opportunity to tell a story that represents some that have never been represented before in an animated film, it was incredibly important."
An adaptation of Nimona has been talked about since Stevenson, now 31, was in his early 20s. Shortly after the graphic novel was published, he found producers and even a director (Oscar winner Patrick Osborne, Disney's Feast short) to start the process of selling the film rights. And even that had its obstacles. The darker side of Nimona as a character — voiced in the film by Chloë Grace Moretz (The Peripheral) — became "a hard sell" to backers, Stevenson admits. At one point in the story, Nimona transforms into a gargantuan shadow beast, becoming the monster everyone has been telling her that she is. "People were nervous around that," he says. "That was a conversation that was happening in a different way around animation. It's a family movie versus a webcomic that can kind of do whatever it wants."
The LGBTQ representation in the film was also something Stevenson fought for. For one, the relationship between Ballister (Riz Ahmed) and Ambrosius (Eugene Lee Yang) has gone from subtext to text. "Even making the comic, I hadn't made it explicit and there was a sense of fear about that at the time, that if I did make it more explicit, it would turn readers off in some way," Stevenson says. "There's been a huge amount of change in the cultural landscape of media in the last 10 years. On She-Ra, I learned just what that fight entailed and what that looked like to try to actually bring that to the screen, despite all the fear swirling around it. With Nimona, this is not to say that it wasn't a fight because it was, it was something that I have known for a while now would be featured in the final version of the film."
Netflix Nimona, in gorilla form, is on the run with Ballister
Quane and Bruno felt the responsibility to remain authentic to the source material, and it was a duty that became more vital in the face of the uphill battle Nimona would face. The film was originally set up in 2015 at 20th Century Fox Animation, with Blue Sky under its umbrella. Then Disney bought Fox, including Blue Sky, in a splashy industry-changing deal in March 2019. Quane and Bruno would come aboard as the new directors shortly after that Christmas.
"It was pretty clear that this wasn't gonna end well," Stevenson says of the acquisition. "They had so many studios already. [Disney] owned several studios and were making tons of movies. So that was really scary right away."
In February 2021, Disney announced it was shutting down Blue Sky, which meant that many of its current projects, including Nimona, would stop production. "It was beyond devastating," Bruno says. "It wasn't just the place I worked, it was a huge part of me. It was my family, my friends. There were people there that went to my wedding, that were there when all three of my kids were born. Every movie is a time capsule, a major part of my life."
Holding out for a hero
Netflix Frances Conroy as the Director and Eugene Lee Yang as Ambrosius Goldenloin in 'Nimona'
Nimona, it turns out, wasn't down for the count. Stevenson had heard the film was about 10 months away from being fully completed at the time of Blue Sky's closure, which meant they had actual footage they could show around town. It was Megan Ellison at Annapurna who saw said footage and vowed to keep the project alive. By April 2022, streaming giant Netflix had saved Nimona and would finally bring the film to screens.
Nimona will now premiere on Netflix this June 30, and a lot has changed culturally since Stevenson first set out to adapt the comic. In 2023, politicians on the far right of the Republican sphere have once again declared war on LGBTQ communities, using tired rhetoric about protecting children as a smokescreen for targeting drag queens and trans individuals. In the state of Florida, amid new laws that restrict the discussion of gender and sexuality in schools entirely, a local teacher came under fire for showing her class Disney's Strange World, a children's film with a prominent gay lead.
Stevenson has seen that specific situation. "It's hard not to think about it," he says. "I think that no one really saw how intense this reactionary panic to the visibility of trans and queer people was going to get and how quickly. That's part of what hits me so hard about it. There's a part in [Nimona] where, as part of the propaganda turning people against Ballister and Nimona, they start turning the citizens of the kingdom against each other. 'There's a monster in our midst. It could be any one of you. It could be someone in your family. It could be sitting next to you right at this moment.' I had seen that scene many times in the making of this movie, and then suddenly it hit me in a new way."
"We never put focus on being a lightning rod or making a point with this movie. This movie, for us, was just representing the world the way we see it around us," Quane remarks. "I would say to those [politicians]: Watch it together. See what it's actually saying instead of judging before. The things we're talking about are universal. They're for everyone, this idea of taking a look at who people are and understanding. It's not scary, it's not bad. We're just trying to be honest with the world that we see and welcome everybody into it."
As a trans person, Stevenson acknowledges how "scary" this time is on a personal level. "But it's also something that I think is so worth doing," he says. "The bravery of just existing and not hiding parts of yourself and not being ashamed, it's never been more important. I think that's what this movie is." He adds, "There were so many times where the plug could have gotten pulled and never plugged back... Whatever lies ahead, I think there's never been a better time to tell this story that this movie is telling."
Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.
Related content:
