Current review: Nimona (2023)
Stylish, funny, with something to say.
Welcome to the futuristic world Nimona lives in – it’s got flying cars, laser weapons, massive digital displays. It’s a really nice- looking world, I like the design of everything – especially, however weird this sounds, how shiny the shiny things are! Ha, you’ll know what I mean when you see it. Important for the story, the people in this world have a deep-rooted culture based on keeping monsters away. They even have “knights” whose job it is to keep up this defence. That brings us to one of our two protagonists – Ballister Boldheart. He’s due to become a knight at a ceremony at the opening of the film. Ballister is a heroic, but low-born, man, and – oops – he gets framed for a serious crime at this knighting ceremony, so immediately becomes a fugitive.
Enter Nimona (our second protagonist). She presents herself as a wannabe sidekick to a bad guy, and she thinks our fugitive friend is the perfect fit. And this basically forms our plot – the pair are going to work together, albeit reluctantly for one of them, to go after whoever framed Ballister.
So who is our title character Nimona? She’s a pink-haired young adult. She’s devil-may-care, she’s gregarious, she appears reckless in the face of danger. As a natural rule-follower and introvert, it can be hard for me to warm to this type of character on screen! But of course there’s more to learn about her that will force first impressions to evolve. One simple example is learning that she has this incredible power – now her unshakeable confidence in a fight quickly makes sense. She’s a shapeshifter: she can change into different animals, Kuzco-style (Emperor’s New Groove), with each form nicely linked visually by the colour pink (unless she’s shapeshifting to imitate a real person). Most of the comedy in this movie comes from her shapeshifting antics, I really enjoyed them. My favourite was her shapeshifting into Ballister and pretending to be a bad guy – but her choice of activity for such a pretence is borrowing a saxophone to play freeform jazz!
Our knight, Ballister: I thought he was a bit on the less interesting side overall. Most of his characteristics at first were nervous and jittery, as he’s scared of being caught and seen… Yet we were told at the opening of the film that he’s one of the best future knights of the realm! This didn’t quite gel. It’s nice to see LGBTQ+ representation in films though: Ballister is in a relationship with a fellow knight (the one who’s leading the hunt to capture him!) who has the hilarious name of Ambrosius Goldenloin! Despite my indifferent feelings to his character (which would probably change on a second watch), I do like the friendship that gradually blossoms between Ballister and Nimona.
Now to the big theme of the movie. Nimona is a shapeshifter, she lives in a world that has learned to fear monsters, and she is… well, not human, so she must be a monster. Ballister naturally fears her too, he’s no exception. He doesn’t shun her, but he does want her to stop shapeshifting. So we have a theme of being different leading to being feared and excluded, and perhaps turning “bad” because of that. It’s not a new theme – recent examples being Luca (2021) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023) - but this film’s approach felt fresh to me in terms of telling us more about what it feels like from Nimona’s point of view. Most of the time, the “different” person can’t help it. Nimona can help it – she can blend in if she wants, she can choose to appear as a human girl. But she tells us what that feels like, trying to suppress her real self, and, in contrast, how it feels when she is authentic. She is in no way a bad person despite her saying from the beginning she wants to “do villainy”! A big tell, which struck hard at my heart, is that her ambition wasn’t even to be one villain on her own (or, a “big bad”, if you’re familiar with Buffy speak). No, she wanted to be a sidekick – it was far more important for her to form a connection with someone than to do evil deeds. And we get a nicely-told backstory that confirms this is what she’s always yearned for.
Rightly or wrongly, my perception of these types of films is usually heavily influenced by the execution of the big climax: did it hit hard emotionally? was it big enough for the story? did it feel like what the characters truly needed? Nimona’s climax really did deliver for me: heartbreaking and uplifting.
This is a solid movie, with plenty re-watchability potential given how much there is to look at in the animation and how dense the little comedic moments are. Rating below!
