Post by Dracula on Oct 3, 2023 10:26:09 GMT -5
Nimona(8/22/2023)
Nimona is in many ways the product of a rather troubled production. The film was being made by Blue Skies Animation, the animation subdivision of 20th Century Fox, right as the merger between Fox and Disney closed. Given that Disney was not starved for animation studios they shuttered the whole division, leaving this movie in limbo (I’m not 100% clear on how far along it was or if they’d begun the actual animating). Fortunately the movie was picked up by Annapurna, who funded the completion of the movie for an eventual distribution by Netflix, which is where it’s streaming currently. That’s certainly a happy ending and the movie has been getting some pretty strong reviews as well so I was pretty excited for it, but the final movie maybe fell a bit short of the expectations that I’d built for it given all the strong buzz it’s gotten. The film is set in this sort of steampunk-esque fantasy kingdom that has modern buildings and certain science fiction technologies but also still has knights and a royal family and the like and all of that is pretty cool but the film never quite makes as much sense out of this world as I was hoping. I’d also say that in its rendering of the world from a visual standpoint there are some limitations as this movie’s troubled production and relatively limited budget was a bit more apparent than I was expecting. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good looking movie from a design perspective and its production values aren’t terrible at all but you can tell that it does not have a Pixar level budget by any means and some of the environments in it looks rather empty and undetailed.
But my bigger problem with the movie comes down to the dynamic between its main point of view character (a knight named Ballister who’s framed for the murder of the queen) and the film’s title character (a transforming mischievous imp who’s sought Ballister out thinking he’s a villain who she wants to be a henchman to). Ballister as a character annoyed me as he spends way to much of the movie moping about his situation and not really acting proactively to deal with his situation, which is just frustrating. Then there’s Nimoa herself, who I just thought was kind of an annoying character and the film’s attempts to giver her a backstory to explain her behavior felt a bit clichéd and predictable despite seeming to think that this is some kind of wildly subversive twist. From there it kind of just goes through your usual animated adventure movie motions. There’s a fairly predictable twist villain, there’s an action scene at the end, and there’s a scene where the characters manage to inspire the people who distrusted them that they’re actually the good guys. So, I’m not sure this is really as much of a creative and new take on western animation as it maybe looks at first glance, but I don’t want to completely dismiss the film’s more surface level creative triumphs as there definitely is some cool stuff in it and I’m curious to see if they’ll maybe be able to do more with it if they can make a sequel under less tumultuous circumstances behind the scenes.
*** out of Five
