By Matthew Moorcroft

Highest Recommendation

• Directed by Nick Bruno and Troy Quane
• Starring Chloe Grace Moretz, Riz Ahmed, Eugene Lee Yang, Frances Conroy
• PG

It’s a goddamn miracle Nimona even exists. One of the final films developed by Blue Sky Studios before the company was unceremoniously shut down by Disney as part of the 20th Century Fox acquisition, Nimona seemed to be destined as one of those legendary, unmade animated films left to history. A “what could have been” led by some promising up-and-comers in the industry in a last ditch effort to save a studio that was under financial trouble and critical strain. And then Netflix, Annapurna Pictures, and DNEG Animation comes to the rescue, saving it from the history books and actually allowing it to be finished.

That alone makes Nimona worth checking out, as it’s place in the canon of animation is likely going to treat it very kindly because of that. But it helps that the final product is also genuinely fantastic, with it’s vibrant, lively animation and fantasy sci-fi, almost post-modern sensibilities that make for a unique experience in family entertainment. It’s actually a real shame it took Netflix to finish this cause now it won’t get the theatrical release it so clearly deserves, but at this point it’s likely that “finishing it” was just simply the priority on this one.

A punk-rock, anarchist version of Shrek, Nimona is a queer allegory so in your face that almost completely does away with the allegory entirely (it’s co-lead character is openly gay and has a boyfriend for crying out loud). An accidental murder leads to a team up between some unlikely companions – the knight framed for the murder with a shapeshifting teenager that can only be described with the personality of a “gremlin” – and a story that challenges the basic status quo of it’s universe. The systems that create us are omnipresent, always controlling us even instinctually, and they are almost entirely broken from the ground up. The only way forward is complete destruction. Long live the anarchy.

And this is reflected in it’s art style, which uses cel-shading to it’s upmost brilliance throughout. Nimona herself, voiced by the ever talented Chloe Grace Moretz, squashes and stretches to fit whatever mold she so pleases, both for dramatic and comedic effect. The design of the world is a mix of retro-futurist, classical medieval, and modern day anachronisms, filled in with a fantastic score by Christophe Beck that is at one moment sweeping fantasy epic and the next a heavy metal guitar solo. Half of animation is almost always about aesthetics and the aesthetics here are nothing short of great, clearly the result of confident storyboarding and clever ideas from the directors in how to visualize a world like this. It’s cartoony without being too much, stylized while still grounded, beautiful to look at but also, purposefully, rough around the edges, lacking the polish of a mainstream Disney animation or even a Spider-Verse. Instead, this is it’s own beast and revels in it.

It’s said beast that ends up packing a whallop of an emotional punch too. For all of it’s heavy comedy and wordplay, as well as fun action sequences, Nimona is ultimately a film about the queer experience – both the positives and the negatives that come from that. We’ve seen before stories where LGBTQ+ people are treated as the “other” but we rarely get to see it played so heartbreakingly straight and real in a family picture like this. Seeing the stone cold reality – that only queer solidarity will survive in the face of prejudice – in a film like this is special, and seeing straight LGBTQ+ representation that isn’t relegated to a quick cutaway that can be removed for overseas audiences is refreshing and inspiring.

Nimona is ultimately likely going to end up as the Mitchells vs. The Machines of it’s year – an underappreciated till too late animated film from Netflix that gets overshadowed by the theatrical competition. That’s a damn shame, but regardless of that, Nimona‘s quality is obvious and it’s worth checking out as soon as you possibly can. It’s fun, hilarious, entertaining as hell, thematically interesting, emotionally powerful, and touching all at once, and showcases the power of creatives in animation when left to do their thing. Disney was stupid to let this go.