Nimona went from being a movie that was almost certainly lost to the ether to an Oscar nominee—a story as miraculous as the sumptuous, wildly inventive, and queer as hell film turned out to be when we finally got to see it on Netflix. But it was only allowed to do so when Annapurna helped bring the project out of the mouse-eared hell it found itself in.
“I had never seen a character like Nimona in a film, let alone an animated family movie,” Megan Ellison, Annapurna Pictures’ founder, told the Hollywood Reporter about her first reaction to animated storyboards for Nimona, as Disney prepared to announce its intent to close Blue Sky Studios, acquired during the Fox merger, in February of 2021. “I needed this movie when I was a kid, and quite frankly, I needed it right then and there. It was the perfect story to come into my life at that moment.”
As part of a new feature about Nimona’s path to the Oscars, directors Nick Bruno and Troy Quane opened up about how, even before Disney shuttered Blue Sky, there was pressure on the adaptation of N.D. Stevenson’s seminal webcomic-turned-graphic-novel hit to pull away from the queer stories at its heart—both the romantic relationship between knights Ballister Blackheart and Ambrosius Goldenloin (played by Riz Ahmed and Eugene Lee Yang), and the trans allegory found in its titular shapeshifting heroine, played by Chloë Grace Moretz. ““The first words out of [Disney CCO Alan Horn’s] mouth were, ‘Can we talk about the gay stuff?’” Bruno told THR. “They said it’s something they want to move toward eventually, but they don’t want to do it just yet.”
Disney’s largely incremental (and occasionally baffling) approach to LGBTQ representation in its stories, as well as its reluctance to get flung into right-wing culture wars around it, had yet to reach its apex in 2021. This was well before Lightyear’s same-sex kiss and the fallout of criticism of the company’s slow-arriving stance on Florida’s infamous “Don’t Say Gay” legislation threw the studio into those culture wars anyway. But it was clear that even if Disney wasn’t actively preparing to shutter Blue Sky, and Nimona with it, it was hesitant to let the best version of the movie be told. When Ellison and Annapurna came aboard as part of a deal with Netflix, that pressure was suddenly gone.
“[Ellison’s] only mandate was, ‘What did you feel like you couldn’t fully express before, under the leadership you had? Do that. Lean into it,’” Quane told THR.
“We were able to make what is typically subtext text,” Bruno added. “Very often in animation there are stories that queer youth will see themselves in—a bunny who is trying to live with cats—but it’s never explicitly said. We didn’t have to be metaphorical. We could say, ‘This is a real relationship.’”
And now, three years after Disney announced its intent to shutter Blue Sky Studios, Nimona stands ready to potentially make Oscars history—a far better fate than us being left wondering what could’ve been.
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