Nick Bruno, always alongside co-director Troy Quane, is a character animator who became a director, and it shows: his films are drawn with care and plotted without surprise. Two features in, the drawing is the reason to watch.
Fi1m perspective
Ballister Boldheart 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. That is the first act of Nimona (2023), and it is where Nick Bruno's cinema, such as it is after two features, shows what it is for. The kingdom is a castle city with screens and flying machines, drawn in flat planes of colour and lit so that the mood of a scene sits in its palette. Bruno and Troy Quane have said they were thinking of The Sword in the Stone and the background painter Eyvind Earle, and you can see it: the computer is doing the work, but the result looks like a page from an old storybook.
Bruno came to directing the long way. He started as an animator at Blue Sky Studios in 2005 on Ice Age: The Meltdown, was a supervising animator on The Peanuts Movie (2015), and made his debut co-directing Spies in Disguise (2019) with Quane, a spy comedy with a message about teamwork. When Blue Sky closed, the pair took Nimona with them and finished it with DNEG Animation and with ND Stevenson, who made the graphic novel. Two films, both with Quane, both about outsiders learning to be a pair.
The animation background is the point. Bruno's films live in faces and small gestures, and the shapeshifting teenager who turns up in Ballister's hideout and refuses to leave is a character animator's dream: she is never one shape for long and every shape is acted. We laughed a good deal, mostly at her, and at Riz Ahmed's Ballister trying to keep his dignity while she rearranges his life. The trouble is everything around them. The plot follows the fairytale path exactly, so that you can see each turn arriving a full scene early, and the adaptation sands down the graphic novel's sharper edges until nothing in it could alarm anyone. We scored it 74 and stand by it: a good evening, not a surprising one.
Bruno has since joined Annapurna Animation to develop new projects. What he can do is settled: he can make a computer draw like a painter and make a drawn face act. What he has not yet shown is that he can direct a story that keeps pace with his pictures. Give him a script as unruly as his teenager and we will be first in the queue. Until then, watch Nimona with a child present, and try not to guess the ending out loud.
Biography
Nick Bruno is an American animator and film director. He began his career at Blue Sky Studios as a junior animator on Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006) and worked on subsequent films including Rio (2011) and Epic (2013). He later served as supervising animator on The Peanuts Movie (2015).
Bruno co-directed the animated films Spies in Disguise (2019) and Nimona (2023) with Troy Quane. He also received a story credit on Nimona, which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. He studied illustration and fine arts at UMass Dartmouth and computer animation at New York University.
