Today’s review comes to us from Noelle K. Bowles. She teaches literature and writing courses at Kent State University at Trumbull, specializing in nineteenth-century British literature, the fantastic, creative writing, women’s literature, and the basic writing courses everyone loves to hate. When not preparing class materials or grading papers, she spends her time kissing her Frenchie, complaining about cat hair, cooking Indian cuisine, and shaping clay into ceramic monsters… oh, and reviewing television and film.
Nick Bruno and Troy Quane’s Nimona (2023) is a funny, sad, and sweet animated film that requires its viewers to carefully consider our society’s typical demand that people remain steadfast to one unchanging identity. The film is based on a webcomic series by the award-winning cartoonist ND Stevenson. While artists should not be conflated with their art, Stevenson’s insights as a transmasculine non-binary person undoubtedly inform the challenges of the titular character.
Poster for Nimona [Netflix]
As the film opens, we learn that Gloreth, a woman who initially drove a fire-breathing dragon away from the kingdom a thousand years before, founded an “elite force of knights and decreed that their descendants would protect the kingdom for generations to come” and walled the city off from the rest of the world. In the present day, we land in a techno-medieval world where the knighting of the commoner Ballister “Bal” Boldheart (Riz Ahmed) subverts the hereditary hierarchy. When Bal’s sword kills the queen, even his boyfriend Ambrosius Goldenlion’s (Eugene Lee Yang) status as Gloreth’s direct descendant is no protection against Bal’s “upstart” status or the crime for which he is framed, maimed, reviled, and pursued.
Into Bal’s isolation and distress waltzes Nimona (Chloë Grace Moretz), a wannabe sidekick seeking connection and validation in what Nimona imagines will be a villain/henchman relationship. She’s out to help Bal “get revenge on the cold cruel world.” But despite his own outsider status and the public dismay directed at his ascent to knighthood, Bal struggles mightily to accept his new companion and literal lifesaver. And it is here that the film makes its most interesting and relevant point: even in a world that is diverse in race and orientation, Nimona’s existence and insistence upon autonomy still poses a challenge for otherwise progressive people.
As a person who is “better and [has] worked harder,” Bal represents any minority who has had to be not just as good but better than those born into privilege to gain any measure of acceptance. While the characters are diverse, women occupy positions of power, and Bal’s love for Ambrosius is presented without any sly winks in dialogue or character design, he is still treated as an other due to his “street kid” background. “Commoner” is used as an insult, and his armor is gray and black, unlike the platinum tones of the other candidates for knighthood. Bal is well-positioned to empathize with other outsiders, but due to his socialization, true and meaningful acceptance of Nimona winds up a heavy lift.
Bal initially identifies Nimona as a “little girl” even as Nimona’s arm rests on and stops a rotating table saw. Here, Nimona responds to the “little” by asking “how old do you think I am?” and lets “girl” slide for the moment. But Nimona is neither of those things: they are themself quite Other, a shapeshifter who uses their powers to free Bal from imprisonment. Bal nearly calls them a monster, a term Nimona vehemently rejects, and he then asks what they are. The answer is simply “I’m Nimona,” an answer repeated throughout the film, and an answer Bal questions until it is nearly too late for everyone.
Although Bal is intimately familiar with problematic expectations, he persists in attempting to define Nimona as the form he first encountered them in: “Can you just be you, please?” At one point, Bal objects to Nimona taking the form of a gorilla, asking, “Can you please just be normal for a second? […] It’d just be easier if you were a girl.” At this point, Nimona has saved his life numerous times, and the empathetic viewer begins to suspect that what first seemed like confusion and curiosity on Bal’s part may be something darker as he continually attempts to control Nimona’s very being.
Even though he is a victim of the kingdom’s oppressive dynamics, Bal was still shaped by its ideology, and he defends the xenophobic wall and the hierarchies and the system that supports it. He makes excuses for Ambrosius’ amputation of his arm against Nimona’s protest that “Arm-chopping is not a love language!” At this point, the savvy viewer may nod along with Nimona’s assessment because Bal’s insistence that “everything will be okay” once the injustice against him is exposed is hopelessly naïve.
Nimona reflects on the ways that hatred is enculturated. Even those who should be most compassionate can, like Bal, be blinded by their socialization. Heartbroken over a child’s terror of them, Nimona says, “Little kids, they grow up believing that they can be a hero if they drive a sword into the heart of anything different.”
The film’s tension points lie in acceptance and empathy versus a status quo whose price is the annihilation of difference. In our present moment, in the face of oppressive legislation against trans people’s very right to exist, Nimona asks us to see each other as complete and valuable, no matter our embodiment or identity.
Nimona is now streaming on Netflix.
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