Nick Bruno and Troy Quane’s animated fairytale about a framed knight and a shapeshifting teenager is funnier and better drawn than its plot, which you will see coming from the castle walls. Worth your evening, particularly with a child present.
Ballister Boldheart (Riz Ahmed) is minutes from being knighted when his sword fires by itself and kills the queen, and the city that raised him decides in the same instant that it always knew he was a villain. Nimona, which Nick Bruno and Troy Quane have directed from ND Stevenson’s graphic novel, is about what he does next, and about the shapeshifting teenager who turns up in his hideout and refuses to leave. It is a fairytale for children about the way a place decides who its monsters are. It is also funny, drawn with real care, and plotted so that you can see each turn arriving a full scene early. We enjoyed it and we were never once surprised by it.
The look is the first thing. Jeff Turley and Aidan Sugano’s production design puts a medieval walled city under holographic billboards, gives the knights lances that fire like rifles, and runs a metro under the castle. It should be a mess and it is not, because everything is drawn in the same flat, inked style: block colours, thick outlines, characters who look like pages of a comic moving through a room with depth. When Nimona changes into a shark or a gorilla or an ostrich, the animators keep her eyes and her grin across every shape, so you never lose her. A chase through the metro, in which she changes four times before the train reaches the next stop, is the best sequence in the film.
Chloë Grace Moretz voices Nimona as a girl who talks faster than anyone can answer, and who greets bad news with the word “metal”. Her first scene with Ballister, in which she covers a wall of his hideout with plans that all end in murder while he tries to explain that he is innocent, is where we laughed hardest. Ahmed plays Ballister as a serious man trying to hold on to his dignity while a rhinoceros demolishes his kitchen, and he is a good straight man; he lets her have every scene and takes the film back in the quiet ones. There is an exchange, later, when he asks what changing shape feels like and she says it hurts more not to. It is written plainly and Moretz plays it plainly, and it got to us. We had not expected to be moved by a cartoon rhinoceros.
The people around them are thinner. Eugene Lee Yang’s Ambrosius Goldenloin, Ballister’s boyfriend and the man ordered to hunt him, is given a real dilemma and about three lines to feel it in. Frances Conroy’s Director runs the Institute with the voice of a woman who has already decided something, and you will guess what a scene or two before the film wants you to. Beck Bennett’s Sir Thoddeus Sureblade is a single joke, the jock knight with a helmet full of nothing, though the joke does land each time. Lorraine Toussaint’s Queen Valerin is warm for the few minutes she has.
Lloyd Taylor and Robert L. Baird’s screenplay has the shape of a dozen framed-hero films: one piece of evidence, one chase to get it, one public unmasking. The children in the audience will not mind. The adults will spend the middle stretch waiting for the film to catch up with what they worked out at the knighting. What the writers do well is the argument underneath, that a city can be wrong for a thousand years and call it tradition, and they mostly trust the pictures to carry it, until a late scene where a character says the moral aloud, twice. Christophe Beck’s score keeps the action clear and never pushes for tears, and Randy Trager and Erin Crackel cut it at 99 minutes, which is the right length.
As a revisionist fairytale it sits a fair way below Shrek, which was crueller and funnier, and as comic-book animation it is not as inventive as Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which it has clearly looked at. It is better than most of what passes for family animation now. Most critics have put it a little higher than we have; we think they have given it credit for its heart and let the plot off. Near the end the film changes visual style for a stretch we will not describe, and it is the boldest thing in it.
Watch it with a child who has recently been told they are too much. They will know who Nimona is before the adults do.
