There has never been a movie quite like Nimona. There have been wonderful family friendly adventures, there have been moving queer love stories, and there have been plenty of beautifully animated films, but in Nimona all three coalesce on screen to make a singular film experience that is both truly made for everyone — and specifically its queer audience.
Make no mistake, Nimona is audaciously queer and radical in many ways — which shouldn’t come as a surprise given it’s from the mind of ND Stevenson, creator of She-Ra and The Princesses of Power — but it’s also wonderfully wholesome and heartfelt. And at its center is an unapologetically gay love story.
But let’s step back for a minute and set the stage. The film focuses on Ballister Boldheart (Riz Ahmed), a would-be knight in a futuristic medieval world, the first commoner ever to be knighted (yes, class is another important theme of the film). His dreams are dashed when he’s framed for a crime, and the only one who believes him isn’t his boyfriend, Sir Ambrosius Goldenloin (Eugene Lee Yang), but Nimona (Chloë Grace Moretz), a mischievous teen with a taste for mayhem on the hunt for a villain to sidekick it with and a penchant for shape-shifting. Together, they have to work to clear Boldheart’s name or tear down the entire system, whatever comes first.
As we said, it’s madcap, radical, and very queer. All of this is not lost on Yang, who calls the experience of bringing a character like Goldenloin to life “wild.” The character, like everyone who populates the world of Nimona, is complex, flawed, and nuanced — or in other words, utterly human. To get to be all of those things and be gay makes Goldenloin, well, the gold standard for the future of queer representation in media.
Yang, a gay man, is now becoming the kind of representation he lacked and needed growing up for the next generation. “It was very surreal to see the experience of watching this film and see how it’s been affecting especially younger people through their eyes. Originating the voice role is such an honor for me,” he tells PRIDE. “He’s so effortlessly queer, but he’s also the hero of the realm. And he loves his man, but he’s also torn between duty and going after his heart. That’s just something I think is just so true to life, and it’s so true to a lot of our experiences, especially as queer people kind of, you know, coming out and coming up, it’s always this feeling of sort of defying these systems that we feel ourselves trapped in.”
While the film is beautiful, and it would be shocking if it doesn’t fetch Oscar buzz, it almost didn’t make it to the screen at all. In fact, it was initially being developed for Disney, who reportedly took issue with the queer love story (and, gasp, gay kiss) so the film languished then eventually was canceled when the studio creating it was shut down.
Cut to Annapurna and Netflix picking up the mostly finished film and giving it not only the release, but the freedom of expression it deserved. Yang sees similarities between the film’s journey to the screen and the queer experience.
“I really love that the story of this production kind of reflects Nimona’s journey and a lot of our journeys as queer people, which is like, it’s a survivor and it’s a fighter, and it happened because of the sheer will and love of all the people who are involved in it,” he explains. “I think that that sort of connects to this idea that as a queer audience member, it’s talking directly to them, and it’s for them, and it’s from the perspective of a queer person who created this story. I think that it’s basically just a conversation that you don’t always get to see so directly in the media.”
The film manages to pull off a difficult balancing act of being a general crowd-pleaser and one that the queer audience will feel was made both for and by them. As Yang explained, it’s both fun and action-packed, but also it winks to the queer audience and he hopes that results in the audience feeling seen in return. “I hope that for queer people in general, they’re going to know those winks they’re going to be like, you caught that but for kids I just want them to feel seen and that is like the ultimate thing about this film,” he says. “The best line in the film is ‘I see you’ and I think that’s what the film is telling these children.”
