Chaos Gremlin

Film: Nimona
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

Of all of the Oscar categories that I actively pursue, none seems more willing to go off the beaten path for a nomination than Best Animated Feature. While a NetFlix movie is not “off the beaten path,” Nimona feels a great deal like it is. This is a movie that I haven’t actually heard a great deal about, and I’m kind of surprised. Based on the story that we get and the way that story unfolds, I struggle to believe that this wasn’t the subject of a series of protests from dudes wearing mirrored sunglasses while recording vertical videos in the cab of their oversized trucks.

What do I mean by that? I mean that Nimona is gay, and I mean that in the literal sense, not in the sense that grade school kids used it 20 or 30 years ago. Our main character, Ballister Boldheart (Riz Ahmed) is in an openly same-sex relationship with the ridiculously-named Ambrosious Goldenloin (Eugene Lee Yang). There are also implications that our title character Nimona (Chloë Grace Moretz) is female-presenting but essentially genderless and attracted to women. So, like 60-70% of the main characters are somewhere in the LGBTQIA+ continuum, which is similarly true of the cast.

Nimona takes place in a futuristic but somehow still Medieval society. A thousand years before the movie begins, a great warrior named Gloreth fought off a monster. A city was built with a massive wall surrounding it, and for the last thousand years, the civilization has flourished inside those walls. The central pillar of this society is the queen (Lorraine Toussaint), who is surrounded by her knights. So, while technology has advanced in the 1000 years, the way that society runs has not. We still have a monarchy and nobility, and the knights are all drawn from the class of nobles, at least until now.

The one changing that reality is our main character Ballister. A commoner, he will be the first non-nobleman to be made a knight in the city’s history. And, of course, at the ceremony, it all goes wrong. His sword fires a laser that kills the queen, and suddenly he is a wanted man who committed a crime in front of the entire kingdom, although he claims to be innocent. His boyfriend Ambrosious attacks, disarming Ballister literally, chopping off his right arm. Ballister escapes and becomes a fugitive.

It is in this exile where he is visited by Nimona, who appears to be a teenage rebel but is actually a shapeshifter, and thus considered a monster by the people of the city. Abandoned by the people around her, Nimona sees Ballister as someone who has the same kind of villainous and evil plans that she does, and she decides to become his sidekick, recruiting him to be her boss. While Nimona wants nothing more than to attack full-bore and destroy everything she can, she is reined in enough to help Ballister try to clear his name, starting with finding the squire who gave him the sword that was used to kill the queen in the ceremony.

The thing about kids’ movies is that you already know the message that is going to be present here, don’t you? We’re presented with a world that is clearly gay-accepting. No one in the story has a problem with the relationship between Ballister and Ambrosious, for instance. In fact, the only problem that exists is that Ambrosious is ambivalent about the guilt of his boyfriend, and he’s taken to task for that, not for the fact that he has a boyfriend. But this is still very much a film about tolerance and acceptance, something it has in common with the vast majority of movies made for kids.

This is not a complaint on my end. It’s a message that needs to be sent over and over, and the fact that it’s still not getting through to some kids means that it’s a message that needs to keep being sent. But if you look at the other movies in this category from this year (and keeping in mind that I haven’t seen Robot Dreams yet), there are definitely some themes of acceptance and tolerance in all of them, some clearly more overt than others (I’m looking at you, Elemental).

Nimona does it right, though, because it doesn’t do it everywhere in the film. By giving us a world where same-sex couples are completely normalized, it can focus on something else as a difference, something that makes Nimona a “monster” in the eyes of the people. If everything in the film were stigmatized in this way, the overall message would feel a lot more diluted.

So, while the story is going in an obvious direction, it does it well. A large part of that is the on-screen chaos of Nimona herself, who is the clear stand-out character of the film. Nimona is all violence and smartass, and she’s an easy sell as a character that people will want to see more of.

Speaking of that, I expected more of this. What I mean by that is that Nimona’s run time on NetFlix is about 103 minutes. Knowing that animated films tend to have longer credits because of all of the animators, I expected about 10 minutes worth of credits. There are 18. More than 15% of the movie is closing credits.

Why to watch Nimona: It’s really, really good.
Why not to watch: 18 minutes of credits? Seriously?