Nimona (2023)

PG for  kinda / sorta scary stuff.  I'm more surprised by the PG rating because people get impaled and killed throughout this movie.  Like, there's no gore, but some of those hits are kind of brutal.  There's a bit of a joke with Nimona bleeding from time-to-time, but it's not really something that one would consider gory.  PG.

DIRECTORS: Nick Bruno and Troy Quane

Fun story!  I swear it was a wild coincidence. My uncle, ages ago, got me the Nimona graphic novel.  It sat on my shelf for ages.  Too long.  I had no reason to not read that book ahead of time.  My goal over the past few years has been to read everything that I own.  It's a crime that it just sits on a shelf.  About a year and change ago, I read the book, really liked it, and thought, "Man, that would make a decent movie."  The next week (THE NEXT WEEK!) the trailer for Nimona came out. Why didn't I watch it?  Reasons.  I don't know.  But now it's an Academy Award nominee and you know how I am with that nonsense.  I watch all of it.

One of my students swears by Nimona.  If you read my blog on Vivarium, you'd realize this is a dangerous thing to say to me.  The thing with student recommendations is that I always really want to really like these movies, but my brain instantly starts picking them apart.  What is wrong with me?  Honestly, it's messed up,  Maybe it's a fear of developing the same tastes that I had in high school or what, but I started to do the same thing with Nimona.  The biggest takeaway, and the thing that mostly encapsulates my feelings on the movie as a whole movie is the tone of the book versus the movie seems like two very different things.  The book feels like a cool garage band.  It's punk in the sense that it is calling for anarchy in everything it does.  The movie feels like overproduced pop punk.  It says "anarchy" a lot, but it feels incredibly corporate.  Part of that comes from the very neat and very clean animation style.  The funny thing about that is that we are in the era of rough art being kind of awesome.  We have stuff like Into the Spider-Verse or Mutant Mayhem that ask their audience to love their rough edges.  Nimona, which is a graphic novel that looks intentionally very sketchy, has this movie that looks like Dreamworks made it over a weekend in 300 animation farms.

On top of that, some of the character stuff is sped through with the film version.  I loved that the book treated Ballister Boldheart as a villain for a lot of the text, only to reveal that he's the hero of the piece.  I know, movies are different than books. Pacing and story are meant to serve the medium.  But by making Ballister this wronged person, Nimona's desire for chaos seems off.  It's silly that she latches onto him, especially considering that she knows almost immediately that he's been wronged.  It seems against her narrative of finding someone who burn the world down.  Ultimately, we find out that this relationship makes a lot more sense, considering that both of them have been wronged by a society that detests its stigmaed classes.  But I don't read Nimona as the kind of character who would have that kind of self-awareness so early on in the movie. The revelation that Ballister is probably innocent really doesn't change her outlook on their relationship outside of seeing him as somehow lamer.  If she was looking for commonality, a comrade-in-arms unjustly exiled from society, she would have admired him more.  

I'm going to get to what I liked about the movie in a second.  I like it more than I dislike the movie, but griping while writing is so much easier than gushing about why a movie is so great.  The jokes don't land.  One of my least favorite feelings is forcing a laugh. The thing about family movies nowadays is that they tend to be genuinely hilarious.  The jokes tend to be low-brow (which is an unfair generalization, but for the sake of argument...) but timed really well.  I saw a lot of what was going on behind the page on this one.  When the movie ended and I saw all of the names on the script for this film, so many questions were answered.  The movie had jokes that, on paper, were funny.  But pacing wise coupled with a rich desperation to make the movie funny kept hurting these moments.  I was on their teams, guys! I  kept waiting for the guffaw and I kept trying to give the benefit of the doubt.  I didn't get much of that.  Instead, I got light snorts out of my nose and those even felt kind of forced.  When that happens, something toxic happens.  The funny character in this movie is Nimona.  She's the one telling all of the anarchy jokes.  But when few of them land, it makes it harder to be sympathetic towards Nimona.

Which is why, thank goodness, the drama and action work in this movie.  Nimona is a lovable character not because she craves nonstop violence (although the book handles that a lot better).  She's lovable because of her story coupled with a society that satirizes our own.  If all stories are meant to be political, this one nails that vibe well.  Yeah, it's preachy.  I would have a hard time standing up for this movie claiming that it didn't wear its philosophy on its sleeves.  But it never felt like it was laying it out.  Instead, the world adapts for the platforms where these political discourses become organic. It's no shock, but the core of this movie is a discussion about homosexuality and trans rights.  What I ultimately love about the movie is that part of the politics is "The fight isn't over."  Ballister and Ambrosius have a relationship from moment one.  People don't hate Ballister because he's gay.  They hate him because he's a commoner.  Ambrosius stays closeted because of his relationship with the socially beneath him Ballister.  

This is where things gets amazingly complex in terms of world-building.  There's almost this progressive attitude about being gay in this world.  At the end of the movie, Ambrosius and Ballister walk hand-in-hand without fear of scorn. The climax of the film doesn't show that they're gay together.  The climax of the film shows that Ballister is a hero and that a hero can come from any rank.  But that message's complexity comes not from the existence or acceptance of homosexuality; it comes from the media spinning truth to make it seem like Ballister shouldn't even exist.  I mean, sure this is a world that has Nimona, a shapeshifter.  I, too, found it odd that they didn't release the whole video showing Nimona changing into Ambrosius to trap the director.  I mean, they made it too easy to Fox News the whole thing by saying that the footage of the Director wasn't her.  I mean, if they wanted to submit the footage that they sent in, they could have just filmed Nimona at home saying all of those things.  

This [chef's kiss!] spirals into the idea that society lives and breathes on the fear that the government can set out there. People are so willing to fear the person that looks different, like Riz Ahmed's Ballister.  He has all of this stuff and only one part of him is the gay part.  He's hated for everything he is.  If I had to be really critical (and the reason that I don't hold it against the movie is that I can't find a way around it) is that Ballister has to be exceptional to be simply accepted.  It's that Jackie Robinson thing.  Ballister should have just been accepted into the military because he wanted to do the right thing.  (I also adore that Ballister is brainwashed enough to immediately try to defend the institution that condemned him, despite so much evidence from guys like Todd.  I do hate that he was right in the end, though.)  But that manipulation of storylines is fascinating because that's all we're dealing with right now.  You guys probably know my politics right now.  I mean, just the fact that I'm excited about a kids' movie talking about media spin means that you can guess what I can think about the potential return of a dictator in the next year.  But we watched all of these atrocities in real time and Fox News just recontextualized them to build fear in a base.

Honestly, the most fictional part of the whole movie is the fact that people saw things with their own eyes and changed.  I want that to be the world.  I know why that's the ending too.  The movie wants us to fight for change as we see it.  We should be screaming at our TV sets, saying that we know what we saw and that spin isn't going to change that.  It may be a bit much to ask this movie to ask to fight the Atticus Finch battle of knowing that he was going to lose and fighting anyway.  

So the second half of the movie is better than the first half.  I want to love this movie.  I really do.  There's so much greatness in the film that the look and feel of the film throwing the movie off is a bummer.  My frustrations have always come from a place of "I know how to fix this" and this is one of those movies.  I would keep the look of the movie closer to ND Stevenson's.  But I also get that kids might not watch something like that.  Either way, this is a mostly successful film.