Incomprehensibly, this is the summer’s best mermaid movie. But the way the film foregrounds the friendship between the ever-fluid Nimona and her gay bestie Boldheart, voiced respectively by Chloë Grace Moretz and Riz Ahmed, is what makes it beautiful. Nimona’s action is staged in a stylized blend of 2-D and 3-D animation, which crescendos toward a kaiju-size climax. When she meets a knight, Ballister Boldheart, who is falsely accused of killing the queen, the two team up and take a stand against the repressive order that previously employed him.
Based on the comic by ND Stevenson, Nimona is a queer parable about a shape-shifter who refuses to adhere to society’s rules for what she should look like or whom she should present as. Two and a half years later, the film is finally out, after a rescue by Annapurna Pictures, DNEG Animation, and Netflix, and it is far better than anyone could have hoped.
In 2021, years into the film’s development at Blue Sky Studios (the animation shop behind Ice Age), the staff of Nimona got tragic news: Its new owners at Disney were killing Blue Sky after acquiring its parent company Fox, and the film - reportedly after Disney execs whined about a same-sex kiss - was to be buried along with the studio.
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