99 min | PG | June 30, 2023 | Netflix
A shapeshifting girl crashes into the life of a knight everyone has decided is a monster. She wants to be his sidekick. He wants his name back, and she is the only creature in the kingdom strange enough to help him get it.
A shapeshifting girl named Nimona attaches herself to a disgraced knight and demands to be his sidekick. The knight is Ballister Boldheart, the first commoner admitted to a kingdom that has spent a thousand years killing anything it cannot explain. Someone frames him for murder, and the realm turns on him in an afternoon. Nimona blends a neon medieval future with the structure of a buddy comedy. The real subject is othering. The film argues that a society which builds walls to keep out monsters eventually decides that anyone outside the wall qualifies.
Chloë Grace Moretz voices Nimona as a creature who weaponizes chaos to hide a wound. She plays the comedy at full volume and lets the hurt leak through the cracks. Riz Ahmed gives Ballister a quiet, wary decency that makes his fall land. He plays a man who followed every rule and got punished anyway. Eugene Lee Yang voices Ambrosius Goldenloin, Ballister’s lover and the knight assigned to hunt him, with divided loyalty written into every line. Frances Conroy turns The Director into a true believer whose certainty is the most dangerous thing in the kingdom.
Nick Bruno and Troy Quane direct with a visual grammar built for speed. Nimona’s transformations never settle into a single look. She becomes a whale, a child, and a rhino, and the animation refuses to smooth the seams between forms. The line work stays rough and graphic, closer to the panel art of the source comic than to the rounded gloss of most studio animation. Robert L. Baird and Lloyd Taylor write the kingdom as a place ruled by screens and surveillance, and the production design dresses ancient stone walls with jumbotrons and holograms. The collision of sword and pixel is the whole thesis rendered in set decoration.
Nimona understands that the monster story has always been about the people who need monsters. The kingdom does not fear Nimona because she is dangerous. It fears her because she refuses to hold a fixed shape, and a system built on rigid categories cannot survive someone who lives outside them. Bruno and Quane keep the pace frantic enough that the message never hardens into a lecture. The film makes its argument and then trusts a wisecracking shapeshifter to carry it home.