Nimona Review
I’ve been making my way through the 2024 nominees for Best Picture and Best Animated Feature. Today I’m going to be talking about one of the nominees for Best Animated Feature, Nimona. A movie that got a little bit of buzz when it dropped on Netflix. I didn’t get a chance to watch it, but I'm watching it now. How is this movie? Is it any good? Here are my thoughts!
The Good:
The best thing about this movie is the animation style. It has a very unique and distinct style to it. So many animated movies in 2023 had different types of animation styles. It’s not as ground breaking or impressive as Across the Spiderverse, but for what the movie is going for, I think it works rather well. I was looking into who did the animation for this movie. They haven’t made a lot of animated movies, the only one I’d heard of was Ron's Gone Wrong from 2021. They’re actually new into the animation genre, they’ve actually worked on the Visual Effects business for a while. They worked on several of the Harry Potter, DC, and other notable franchise films. Since they have a long history with Visual Effects, they have a great eye for detail and can make everything look interesting and cool. It’s easy to see how elements of this movie can work in live action.
The movie also has interesting world building, it’s this world you want to spend more time in either a prequel or a sequel. It’s a fun world because it’s a mix of medieval culture in this futuristic world. During the action sequences, we’re seeing knights with swords but they’re futuristic swords flying around in futuristic vehicles. It has this fun world building skin over the entire thing. The opening couple of minutes establish this rich mythology, the world has a rich history. I think the nature of the story and this world, there’s more stories to tell.
From there, the story they’re telling her is rather interesting. It’s basically about a knight who gets framed for a murder he didn’t commit. He’s trying to prove that he's innocent. It’s sort of like The Fugitive in this interesting world. I like movies like that, you know what our lead characters’ goal and objective is through-out the entire film. This sets up a lot of action sequences, twists and turns that change the way you view certain characters and certain characters’ relationships with each other.
Finally, the movie has some interesting ideas it’s trying to explore. It’s exploring ideas of acceptance and is what we believe in actually the right thing. It’s these interesting ideas that are pretty heavy for an animated kids film. But that’s what makes it interesting, the movie is able to take these big ideas but done in a way that gives our character these character arcs. This is our first adventure with them, these themes and ideas are how we learn aspects about them. We learn about the title characters, Nimona’s back story through exploring these ideas.
The Bad:
The big thing here is the structure and pacing of the story is very messy and really holds the movie down. Like I said, the movie has the plot of The Fugitive with the lead character trying to clear his name. That’s a very simple plot for a movie, but it felt like they didn’t have enough story to fill the run time. The idea of the movie is better than the action of the movie. Without going into spoilers, about 55%-60% of the way through the film, there’s a twist revealing who’s behind the entire thing. The characters celebrate it, but we know there’s still 30-40 minutes left in the movie, So you know there’s another twist and what happens in the last third of the movie comes out of nowhere. It’s kind of set up earlier, but not enough to make the finale feel fully earned. I get the ideas they are trying to explore in the finale, but it feels a bit forced with the way it’s structured. They went for something big and epic in the finale, when I don’t think you need to. I think there’s a way you could have done a smaller finale that works better. I also think the film had one twist to too many, the information revealed in the finale didn’t need to happen.
Another problem, the movie feels like a sequel to a movie we never got. While I like these types of stories, The Fugitive is one of my all time favorite movies. That type of story isn't the best for the first time meeting these characters. The movie sets up this relationship between our lead character and a close friend, but we never understand why they care about each other so much. So I felt like the movie lacked some emotional weight, the friend is one of the characters trying to hunt him down. I felt like if this was a sequel and we had another movie to understand them, the emotional weight for the movie would go up for me.
Finally, the movie has serious issues with the tone. Especially with the character of Nimona. When she’s introduced she’s presented as this out cast that is living on the streets that has these shape shifting abilities. She’s quirky and weird, she’s very much acting like a child. But as you go through-out the movie, they tried to give her backstory for why she’s acting the way she is. But I felt like they went too far with that, especially with what Nimona tries to do in the finale. I don't think it is a scene to put kids in a movie, I don’t think it’s something kids should be learning about with this movie. Again, I get the message they’re trying to explore here: the execution of it doesn’t work and makes it a movie that I don’t know I would recommend to kids.
Final Thoughts: My expectations for this movie were high because it was getting all of this love. My cousin told me to watch it when it came out. I feel like this movie had all of the pieces to be really good. If you don't know the backstory, basically this movie was supposed to be a film from Blue Sky Animation, but due to Disney buying the studio the film was canceled. In 2021 Netflix got the rights and distributed it, this was the movie we saw. I think with some of that Disney magic, maybe Pixar magic this could have been better. Something different for the studio, but it wasn’t. I think the film had some good ideas that were executed poorly. And a message that I don’t think is good for kids to understand.
The Score: 7.8/10 (C+)
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