Once upon a time there was a serialised webcomic named Nimona, created by ND Stevenson, who identifies as non-binary and likes to be called Nate. Set in a futuristic medieval world, Nimona told of the eponymous shapeshifter — usually a teenage girl, but able to transform into any human or animal — who joins forces with Ballister Blackheart, a knight wrongfully convicted of murder, to bring down the ruling elite. With themes of queerness — Ballister and his rival, fellow knight Ambrosius Goldenloin, are an item — and gender fluidity, Nimona was both deeply personal for its creator, who was diagnosed with dysphoria, as well as a cult hit, prompting HarperCollins to publish the webcomic in book form in 2015.
Around the same time, Roy Lee’s Vertigo Entertainment hooked up with Stevenson, and together they inked a deal with Blue Sky Studios, then the animation arm of 20th Century Fox, to turn Nimona into a feature film. Patrick Osborne, who won the best animated short Oscar in 2015 for Feast, was signed to direct, with Marc Haimes writing the script. But things started to go awry as the project entered pre-production. Haimes’ script took several major departures from the source material, with Nimona reduced to a sidekick and the LGBTQ+ elements watered down. “Every time something was chipped off [Nimona], I felt it in a very real way,” says Stevenson.
Then, in 2019, Disney bought Fox and assumed control of Blue Sky which, after several years of trying to get Nimona to work, organised a series of brainstorming sessions with its creative talent to find a way forward. “The film had gone in all these different directions because there were so many fun things to explore,” says Nick Bruno, who, with Troy Quane, was then working on the studio’s secret-agent pigeon comedy Spies In Disguise. “What became clear was there were two different philosophies of how to approach the movie,” continues Bruno. “And what had started happening is Karen Ryan, who was one of the producers, started opening up discussions to anyone who had particular feelings about the graphic novel, like, what did it mean to you?”
The overwhelming feedback from artists and animators was that they wanted the film to not just retain but embrace the source’s LGBTQ+ leanings. “We started pushing into that direction and it became about that conversation,” says Bruno who, like Quane, is not a member of the LGBTQ+ community.
“Afterwards, Karen said, ‘Can you come back tomorrow?’ I knew in that moment I was falling for the film,” he continues. “I had a panic attack in that room, because I was like, ‘I want to help this movie, I want to do it justice,’ but I felt the enormous weight of… this is going to be a big challenge. Disney is a company that’s not historically known for leaning into those themes.”
In the graphic novel, Ballister and Goldenloin are lovers. But in early versions of the script, they were just friends. “We felt they were struggling to put a story together because they were ignoring the truth of who the characters were,” says Quane.
“It’s interesting to take a story and make what might seem like a small change but it destroys one of the central cornerstones,” adds Stevenson, who is a co-producer and shares an additional screenplay credit. “If those characters don’t have that kind of relationship, if they’re not trying to get back to each other, then their motivation is gone.”
Following the brainstorming sessions, Quane and Bruno were asked to take over on Nimona but, having just finished Spies In Disguise, neither was ready to go back to work just yet. “Nick and I were pretty dead,” says Quane, “and we were going to take some time off.” Nevertheless, their passion for Nimona won out and the pair were announced as directors in early 2020, bringing on Robert L Baird and Lloyd Taylor as screenwriters and “going back to the graphic novel”, explains Quane. “It was a page-one rewrite. We redesigned Goldenloin and a couple of the shapeshifts, but otherwise the look was established as we moved forward.”
Soon, a voice cast was assembled, with Chloë Grace Moretz as Nimona, Riz Ahmed as the renamed Ballister Boldheart and Eugene Lee Yang as Goldenloin. “Chloë’s incredible,” says Quane. “There was something about her ability to be funny and unexpected, but instantly shift gears into this emotional sincerity. She’d been a fan of the graphic novel, and there was a connection to the material. You cast for a great performer, you cast for a great voice — but a connection to the material became hugely important, which is why we reached out to Riz, to Eugene. To find people who connected to the character journeys.”
Studio shutdown
Production moved to remote working when the pandemic hit in 2020, but the next April, Disney announced it was closing Blue Sky with the loss of around 450 jobs. All projects were cancelled, including Nimona, which after 11 months’ work had a completed set of reels (animated storyboards), two fully animated scenes, and another two roughly animated. Following the shutdown, a Blue Sky employee claimed Disney had tried to pressure the filmmakers into cutting a scene in which Ballister and Goldenloin kiss and say, “I love you.”
“It was never so direct,” says Quane. “They had a lot of discomfort with the film. Part of it is these movies aren’t inexpensive. And a place like Disney wants to appeal to the broadest possible audience. In trying to not be offensive, you’re being incredibly offensive. There was definitely pushback. There was discomfort with where we wanted to take the story.”
Despite these challenges, Nimona just would not die. Three months after Blue Sky shuttered, Megan Ellison’s Annapurna Pictures picked up the project. “She’s a huge superhero in this story,” says Bruno of Ellison. “She saw the reels and said, ‘This is a movie I needed when I was a kid. I will pay whatever we need to get it out of that Disney vault and in front of kids.’ So she spent a James Bond villain’s fortune to get it and said to us, ‘Whatever you need to do to be more authentic in that story, do it.’”
With almost all Blue Sky’s animators having found other work, Quane and Bruno partnered with DNEG Animation to finish the film, while Netflix stepped in to distribute. “I give them a huge amount of credit because there was never a single conversation about content,” says Quane.
Nimona was released in June on Netflix and is available in all 190 territories served by the streamer. “Coming from old-school theatrical, I like to sit in a darkened cinema with 350 strangers and enjoy that connected experience,” says Quane. “But they put it into every single market they had and, in all honesty, if it had gone theatrical, there would have been some markets we wouldn’t have got clearance for. So Netflix allowed a story and a message and a film that a lot of people would love and need to see to have access to it.”
No comments yet