Nimona (2023) - Movie Review

Blue Sky Studios deserved better. I had given them a lot of flak for stuff like the Ice Age series and the Rio series, but their last two features not only showed drastic improvement from that standard, but showed that they had carved out their own niche in the modern animation market. Ferdinand had its growing pains, but still had some solid messaging, and Spies In Disguise only built on them further to make something even better. At long last, they found their (in my opinion) much-needed lane for today's family films with some strong pacifist messaging.

Then Disney bought out Blue Sky’s parent company 21^st Century Fox, repeatedly delayed their next feature, and then outright cancelled it along with Blue Sky Studios as a whole. The company that thinks digging up the graves of their previous successes, and that a new coat of CGI paint will cover the smell of stale corpse that is being paraded in front of audiences for profit, is a sound business strategy, but allowing a studio to continue operation and produce media that, just maybe, people might actually want to watch isn’t.

But out of the ashes of Blue Sky, this film still managed to take flight. Picked up by Annapurna Pictures, with animation by DNEG (who proved their salt as a dedicated animation studio with Ron’s Gone Wrong and Entergalactic), and Spies In Disguise directors Nick Bruno and Troy Quane (who were originally slated for the helm before Blue Sky got shuttered) brought back in. That this whole production exists as a manifestation of hubris and spite against the conglomerate that tried to stop it from being made, quite frankly, has already earned my respect. But hoo boy, did it not stop earning it from there.

The cast are all amazing. Simple as. Chloë Grace Moretz in the title role is ADHD. No, that wasn’t me failing to properly edit myself; I didn’t say she has ADHD, I said she is ADHD. She is hyperactivity personified, equal parts bordering-on-obnoxiously energetic and just plain murder-crazy. I can see her rubbing some audiences the wrong way from how 110% she is in just about every scene, but she got a laugh out of me right from the start when she asked Ballister if he got to keep his severed arm, and she managed to keep charming at every point after that. Speaking of Ballister, Riz Ahmed does well with the tried-and-true ‘man on the run for a crime he didn’t commit’ routine, playing as the ideal straight man to Nimona’s chaotic punk vibrancy, and being all kinds of cute opposite Eugene Lee Yang as Ambrosius, a fellow knight and his boyfriend.

From there, DNEG’s work on both the rotoscoped character models and the backdrops do a lot to give this film its own identity. The cyberpunk/medieval world the story takes place in, contrasting modern technology with a feudal aesthetic where knightly arena combat is their Superbowl, not only looks really damn good and exhibits some decent world-building just through how all the pieces fit together, but it also serves as a terrific foundation for the larger story being told. Like the setting, the story takes thematic cues from older stories and supercharges them with modern clarity and contemporary messaging.

Said messaging falls into similar areas as films like ParaNorman, interrogating the noble cultural impression of the knight through their status of ‘good’ relying mainly on them defeating monsters… and how, in most societies both then and now, ‘monsters’ tend to just be anyone who can be considered the Other. In this case, we have both Ballister trying to clear his name after the Queen is murdered, and Nimona… well, she wholly embraces her status as the ‘bad guy’. She’s queer-punk with a Satanist framework, where non-conformity within an unjust society becomes its own kind of virtue. And in her case, as a shapeshifter dealing with the trauma of past interactions with ‘normal’ people, that ability is treated with a lot of trans subtext. Ballister openly wonders why she can’t just be a girl (rather than a whale or gorilla or whatever else she can turn into), and when he asks if she can just be normal, she gives him that particular look that says “To me, this is normal; you not accepting that is your own problem”.

For as brightly-coloured and hyperactive as this film is, its most powerful moments are much quieter than that. The ones that deal with Ballister feeling a need to prove to everyone that he deserves to be a knight, when those same people deem him unworthy purely because of his status at birth. The ones where Nimona’s kayfabe shell cracks ever so slightly, and the vulnerable and well-within-her-right-to-be-pissed-off person underneath shows through. The ones where that liberation in revelling in the enemy status that society bestows on them rubs against the want to be seen and understood… and how it sometimes gets so bad that living with it seems impossible.

It's surprisingly emblematic of 2023 as a year in Queer cinema, where the better features were the ones that didn't play into respectability politics for the sake of mass appeal. The very idea that the oppressed are the ones who need to make themselves look non-threatening in order for others to stop oppressing them is one of the most insidious forms of victim-blaming there is. No matter how hard Queer people try to make themselves ‘one of the good ones’, just so that the societal systems that want them all taken out can claim that they have a token ally, it will never be enough to convince some that people are, in fact, people. Not monsters. Not creatures whose mere existence is a threat to the fabric of society and the people who live in it. Not excuses to stop learning new things.

It's easy to fall into the darkness thinking about shit like this. I mean, I’m a cis male, but all the arguments being made today against these very people (the ones who can change how they look and don’t conform to the static nature of our own existence) are the same ones that have been used against the Ls, the Gs, and even the Bs like myself over the decades. That people within our own communities join in the pitchfork-waving is genuinely heartbreaking, seeing them fall into the same ‘they’re making us look bad’ reductionism that led past generations into sanatoriums and gas chambers. It fucking sucks… but we can’t let that stop us. It can feel like screaming at a brick wall, trying to convince others that they’re being manipulated just to maintain a fraudulent status quo, and being told that the real enemies aren’t the ones pulling the strings, but the ones being strung up alongside the rest of us. But we have to keep fighting, not just for ourselves but for everyone else as well. Because real bravery, real heroism, isn’t about killing monsters. It’s by saving people.

Knowing how squeamish and fairweather Disney regularly is regarding LGBTQ representation in their animated films, I’m kind of glad that they didn’t take this project through to completion because they likely would’ve just completely fucked up the Queer context that makes this story so bloody good. It hits all the sweet spots for a proper animated family film, from the high hit-to-miss ratio on the jokes, to the fun and engaging characters, to the beautiful visuals and action scenes. But its emotional core is forged from palpable and endlessly heartfelt solidarity with all colours of Queer under the rainbow, sharing just as much with their pain as with their triumph. This has an aptitude for raw sadness that can hold its own against the most traumatic moments in Pixar’s filmography, and when it soars, it fills my heart with hope that, even in the face of continuing oppression and casually shitty behaviour towards Queer and Trans people, we’ll be able to break down those walls.

I intentionally saved this film for last in 2023 because I’d been hearing a lot of positive buzz about it, and I wanted to end the year on a good note. But even more so than the film itself, I want to end this year on a positive note for everyone reading this, and has ever read anything I’ve put up on here this year. Shit’s getting weird out there, for all of us, but know that you’ll never go through it alone. I may not be able to offer much, as just a bunch of erratically-arranged words on a page, but every bit of hope I have for a better world for the both of us, I offer willingly and gladly. We’ve made it this far. We got this. Stay metal.