I can remember exactly where I was when I read ND Stevenson’s graphic novel NIMONA for the first time. I was sitting in an airport lobby, flying back home after having to fire somebody who worked for me. Despite the dismissal being for cause, I felt like a gigantic heel.
Brief aside, in my personal opinion, if you ever get to the point where the act of terminating somebody’s employment doesn’t leave you a little bit melancholy, you probably need to rethink your own line of work. Or maybe I’m just sensitive.
Either way, I was sitting in the airport lobby, feeling like a bad guy and reading a graphic novel about a bad guy who maybe wasn’t quite as bad as he saw himself. It was all very on the nose.
Flash forward a few years later and NIMONA is now an excellent animated film for Netflix. The journey of NIMONA’s adaptation is an interesting one - the film was first developed by Blue Sky Studios and 20th Century Fox. When Disney acquired Fox, though, the film’s production was shut down, despite the fact that 75 percent of the movie had been completed. The film’s LGBTQ content is said to have been at least partially the reason the film was canceled by Disney. Thankfully, Annapurna Pictures came to the rescue, funding the film’s completion and then releasing it through Netflix.
The movie stars Chloë Grace Moretz as Nimona, a shape-shifting teenage girl who decides to become a sidekick to Ballister Boldheart (Riz Ahmed), a disgraced knight who has been falsely accused of killing the queen and labeled public enemy number one. This marks a big change to the original graphic novel - which saw Ballister Blackheart (notice the name change!) already established as a supervillain following a jousting accident that led to his dismissal from the kingdom’s knights. In both versions, though, Nimona’s desire to wreak havoc on the city and cause trouble for the establishment greatly outweighs Ballister’s. Nimona is a badass not afraid to break heads and take names and its her influence that drives Ballister further into a life of crime.
Nimona is cut from the same creative DNA as Elliot Page’s character Boltie from James Gunn’s SUPER and even Sophia from my own comic WHERE WOLF. I’m sure I was as subconsciously inspired by Nimona while writing Sophia as I was very consciously influenced by SUPER.
It’s a good change, though - by revealing early into the film that Ballister is falsely accused, it allows his journey to clear his name to complement Nimona’s own mysterious past. Is this demonic teen just a rambunctious prankster or is she really the monster folks keep accusing her of being? How much of her identity is shaped by the perceptions of those around her? Is it possible to change the way you see yourself if everybody around you sees you as somebody else?
It was appropriate that I watched NIMONA with my girlfriend. Lucía and I have been dating for the last eight months and being in a relationship is a push and pull between how she sees me and how I see myself. I don’t have the greatest self-confidence. I tend to dwell on my shortcomings - I focus on the things I do wrong instead of the things I do right. When I’m with Lucía, though, I see myself through her eyes and it makes me want to be the person she sees me as. I try harder to make the decisions that will bring me closer to the version of myself that Lucía believes in - the version I also want to believe in. Lucía makes me want to make the right choices and be a good guy, even when a past full of mistakes makes me all-to-often feel like a villain.
Dating Lucía makes me realize just how important it is to be with people who see your potential. Being a good person is a choice - a choice you have to make every single day of your life, but a choice nonetheless. Being in a relationship with Lucía makes me want to make the right choice - even if that choice is to spend Saturday evening cuddled up on the couch watching a profound AF and funny-as-hell animated movie about damaged people making the same choice.
The choice to do good.