Nimona

Nimona (2023) begins with a knight framed for a crime and driven into hiding. A shapeshifting teenager attaches herself to him and offers to help. Nimona is classified as a monster, and the institution that decides who counts as a monster is the film's real target. The film's own history runs on the same theme. Blue Sky Studios had been working on it since 2015. On 9 February 2021 Disney closed the studio and cancelled the film. Director Troy Quane said it was past seventy percent through layout, with five sequences fully animated and the character models and locations finished. In March 2022 three former Blue Sky staff said Disney's leadership had objected to the film's LGBTQ content, specifically a kiss between two male characters. Annapurna and Netflix rescued it in April 2022. Annapurna's chief executive Megan Ellison championed it and said why plainly: as a lesbian, she had needed this film as a kid. DNEG took over the animation and about ninety percent of Blue Sky's story survived. The source is ND Stevenson's 2015 graphic novel, and Stevenson is a co producer on the film. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and won Annie Awards for writing and voice acting. It runs 99 minutes. Good for: animation that inverts genre conventions, stories about exclusion, and fast comedy. Less good for: the tone jumps constantly and the moves between joke and tragedy are abrupt. The worldbuilding is rushed, with the institutions assumed rather than explained.