What a struggling Disney could learn from Nimona‘s surprising success
Netflix's new animated film could have been a much-needed win for Disney. Instead, the Mouse House tried to kill it
Film Features Nimona
Everyone loves a comeback story. Not so long ago, it seemed like the animated film based on ND Stevenson’s graphic novel Nimona would be an unfortunate casualty of corporate consolidation, a footnote in the story of one major Hollywood studio gobbling up another. Originally in development at Blue Sky Studios, the nearly completed Nimona was considered all but dead when Disney shut down Blue Sky after acquiring the animation studio as part of its 20th Century Fox purchase. Fortunately, that wasn’t the end for Nimona, but rather a new beginning for the ambitious, innovative project.
Indie distributor Annapurna Pictures stepped in to revive the film, with British animation house DNEG taking over the work of completing it. Following a warm reception at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival on June 14, Nimona finally got a chance to reach a wider audience when it premiered on Netflix on June 30.
Set in a world that creatively combines medieval and futuristic aesthetics, Nimona tells the story of Ballister Boldheart (Riz Ahmed), a former knight-in-training who is framed for murder and vilified throughout the kingdom. His bad reputation attracts the attention of a mischievous shapeshifter named Nimona (Chloë Grace Moretz), and she attaches herself to him as an aspiring sidekick. Together, they set out to unravel the mystery of who set him up, and in the process uncover even deeper and more dangerous secrets at the heart of the kingdom. The film enhances the graphic novel’s themes of acceptance and inclusion, especially in the representation of queer identity in its lead characters. When we first meet Ballister he’s in a relationship with a fellow knight, and Nimona is genderfluid. She (or he or they, all pronouns apply) spends most of the film in the form of a human girl, but is uncomfortable staying in any one shape for long.
Since its release on Netflix, Nimona has been embraced by critics, animation fans, and especially the LGBTQA+ community. It’s currently rated at 93 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, with both critics and audiences. The graphic novel sold out on Amazon the weekend after the film came out on Netflix, and it’s already picking up very early Oscar buzz. There have been lively discussions about it on social media and articles gloating about what Disney missed out on when they canceled the project. Because the only thing people love more than a comeback story is one of comeuppance.
But rather than bashing Disney for its obvious blind spots (as much fun as that can be) we thought we’d be constructive instead. There are valuable lessons the studio could learn from Nimona’s winding journey from page to screen, including how to better connect with audiences, something the studio has had trouble doing of late. Pixar’s most recent film, Elemental, had the lowest opening weekend box-office total in Pixar history, continuing a streak of underperforming titles like Strange World and Lightyear. If things keep going this way, 2023 is on track to be Disney’s first year without having a $1 billion hit since 2014. But it doesn’t have to be like this. Perhaps with a change of course Disney might be able to write a comeback story of its own; it wouldn’t be the first time.
Out with the same old
Nimona has a bold and innovative visual style—it doesn’t look like any other animated film you’ve seen lately. Audiences are clearly craving originality; witness the enthusiastic response to Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse compared to the disappointing box-office showing by generic CG fare like Elemental and Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken. What felt fresh and new a decade ago now seems stale and ordinary.
In its current corporate incarnation, Disney has been hesitant to challenge audiences with anything that strays too far from its established brand. That may make business sense, considering the ballooning budgets of animated films these days, but it’s a creative dead end. Even when a film like Strange World attempts to do something a little different, the studio cannot figure out how to market it to the general public. Nothing in the ad campaign for that film gave any hint of how weird and imaginative its visuals really were. Would that have made a difference at the box office? Who knows. But we do know that Disney’s generic approach didn’t work.
There’s so much more that can be done in animation when creators and artists are given the freedom to push the envelope. Why limit them to the same old formulaic approach? Trust moviegoers to accept the unexpected—like a castle in the middle of a busy urban city center, or knights in armor on floating motor scooters, or a jailbreak on the back of a giant pink rhino (yes, Nimona has all of that).
New characters for a new generation
Character design is another area where innovation is vital. The dynamic characters in Nimona wouldn’t fit into any world but their own. Their faces are expressive, diverse, and not always pretty. Those perfect imperfections are striking because Disney would never allow them. They don’t fit the studio’s template, or its high standards of beauty.
There’s a term artists use when they get into a rut, drawing similar features on their characters over and over again—same-face syndrome. This term has recently been applied to Disney’s modern digital characters too. You could take a character from one film and drop them in another and they wouldn’t stand out (as they literally did with a Rapunzel cameo in Frozen). Disney’s female characters tend to have big, bright eyes, delicate noses, and narrow lips (the few exceptions are mainly non-white supporting characters), while the males have either bulbous or pointy noses, big eyes or beady eyes, rarely anything in between. At least the guys get more variation in their body types. With the notable exception of Encanto’s Luisa (who became a fan-favorite breakout character, despite pushback from Disney executives), most of Disney’s women and girl characters are similar in size, on the slender side, with tiny waists and gentle curves.
Nimona, in her girl form, isn’t built like a Disney princess, that’s for sure. She’s got a short, stocky, athletic body. Unlike your typical Disney ingénue, she’s allowed to make ugly, even monstrous, faces. It doesn’t take anything away from the character. In fact, it makes her that much more interesting.
It’s okay to make it gay
The closure of Blue Sky Studios was a major factor in the delay of Nimona, but it certainly wasn’t the only one. The pandemic slowed things down, of course, and then there were the notes from Disney executives overseeing the film. According to a report published by Insider, sources inside the production said that their Disney bosses raised concerns over the unvarnished queer themes and a same-sex kiss between Ballister and his boyfriend, Ambrosius Goldenloin (Eugene Lee Yang). “Nimona had faced other hiccups through its development process, notably delays,” Insider reported. “But it was still a project Blue Sky staffers were enthusiastic about, and felt it could be a step forward for the studio. Now, it’s unlikely to see the light of day.” And yet, a little more than a year later, here we are.
That was in the spring of 2021, a year before the company stepped into a quagmire over its response to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. In an attempt at damage control, then-CEO Bob Chapek released a now infamous statement in March 2022 that ended with: “I believe the best way for our company to bring about lasting change is through the inspiring content we produce, the welcoming culture we create, and the diverse community organizations we support.” That was news to the creatives who had worked on Nimona while it was at Blue Sky and experienced first-hand pressure to tone down the queer content in their film.
Disney doesn’t have a great reputation when it comes to LGBTQA+ content on screen, and its attempts to correct that so far have been seen as half-hearted by the community. Releasing a film like Nimona in its current unapologetic form without pressure or meddling could do a lot to turn that perception around and earn back some of the trust the studio has lost.
Don’t be afraid to take risks
All of this advice comes down to one simple lesson: take more risks. Walt Disney himself didn’t become a success by playing it safe. The company he started with a “suitcase and a dream” has grown into a massive media empire, but it’s seemingly lost some of the original spirit of experimentation and adventure along the way.
With the cost of making films constantly rising, it makes sense that Disney, and every other major studio, has become risk averse. The justification is that sticking to a proven formula pays off because audiences know what they’re getting before they head to the theater. That’s obviously the reason why so many studios continue to exploit their well-known intellectual properties. But that IP-heavy approach can only be sustained for so long before it starts backfiring, and the reverse becomes true. Audiences will stay away from something they feel like they’ve already seen too many times before.
This may not be obvious to the bean counters, but there are other ways of measuring success than raw numbers. The tendency to simplify everything in terms of “line goes up” or “line goes down” doesn’t leave a lot of room for nuance. To put it into corporate speak, a title could simply add value to a brand. It could improve consumer confidence. A film that connects with a niche audience could be a loss leader, an investment in the future. Nimona is doing all of these things for Annapurna, which created an entire animation division after taking on the film, but it could have been doing that for Disney instead. We sincerely hope the Mouse House is paying attention.
63 Comments
I loved Nimona in all its forms (heh), but I don’t know if it’s really a success, mostly because of Netflix metrics. I haven’t heard that much buzz after the release, and I want to emphasize that all reviews came out one or two weeks before it’s release, so when it got out there wasn’t a homepage article in most websites. This is the first opinion piece since release that I’ve read.
I have not heard of this movie outside of this site. I don’t think going for niche audiences is what Disney needs now.
This is comparing apples to oranges, to some degree, though, isn’t it? There’s a major difference in trying to release a film to theaters and dropping it on an in-house streaming service, not the least of which being the marketing costs.
A theatrical release requires a major marketing push. A streaming service drop might have literally no marketing beyond seeding it really high in the algorithm/suggestions.
Disney has an in-house streaming service too, they could easily have dropped it there. I’m not sure Nimona could hack it as a theatrical film – especially in the increasingly rough theater market – but it’s top shelf streaming media for sure.
You have to keep in mind the business model, though. Disney doesn’t acquire films to distribute the way Netflix does. (Disney buys companies whole and swallows them, but they don’t really buy individual movies). Netflix doesn’t really have an in-house style for animation AFAIK, and they wouldn’t need to adhere to that for an acquisition anyway. Disney has almost 100 years of animated feature films that have pretty much cemented its style. An original film from Disney still needs to feel and look like a Disney film. Ms White is missing here that the similar looks and styles of their characters is more than a feature rather than a bug, it’s essential for Disney’s business model. They aren’t just a film studio, they run theme parks and toy lines and apparel and all of those characters are frequently jumbled together. (See a million versions of the “Princess” T-shirts).
I find it curious. The woke mob criticizes Disney for its films but now they are okay with Netflix releasing an animated family film about gay knights. That’s hypocrisy.
Are… Are you calling me the “woke mob?”We did it boys! Woooooooo! Woke mob achieved! Ahem. I’d like to thank my parents, my antifa supersoldier minions, and of course Gay Jesus. I never thought I’d be here. Truly blessed right now.
Yes. I’d be curious to know how many people have seen Ninoma (recognizing that Netflix does not make that easy to know). It might be that Nimona — an unconventional animated movies with strong queer themes — is reaching a largely niche audience. That can make perfect sense for Netflix from a business perspective — what it needs is a lot of content, some of which will strike a chord with certain viewers, much of which won’t. But it doesn’t follow from that that a movie would do great at the box office, or that Disney executives are necessarily sitting around and thinking they made a mistake.
According to Netflix it was #2 last week.
Yeah, the premise of the article is pretty ridiculous, but it is nice to see a smart, innovative, and unabashedly queer animated feature reach some level of success, if only to shut up the “go woke, go broke” crowd for a while. (I know, they’ll never shut up, but one can dream.)
I think the premise is perfectly arguable and just as perfectly rebuttable. Great for discussion. I think it’s fair to use Nimona to critique Disney’s approach, even if saying that it is a “failure” for Disney that it needs to learn from is a bit far, at as far as Disney is concerned. Disney is so big and powerful that it “fails” the same as Amazon does, in that it itself creates and manipulates the systems which say what is and is not a failure, so even when it fails by other people’s standards, it succeeds at its own, and suffers no ill consequence. This was a tax write off which was then sold at a profit. Creativity and inclusion doesn’t come into the discussion, or if it does, it does so incidentally.
There’s not just marketing, but production. Nimona got close to finished before it was sold off – how much did it cost to make? How much did Netflix pay for it? Strange World, Lightyear and Elemental all cost in the neighborhood of 180-200 million, making the bar for success pretty high.
Exactly.
What caught my eye initially was “struggling Disney” in the header (and “much-needed win” in the sub-header). Caught me off-guard, and I was interested in seeing that discussed, and then I think I found it: “If things keep going this way, 2023 is on track to be Disney’s first year Disney without having a $1 billion hit since 2014.”Oh.You know, maybe it’s not time for Disney to hit the panic button just yet.
Poor Disney investors, not getting to leech quite as much money from the people who do the actual work as they usually do.
Their first year since 2014? Shit, I’ve had 8.5 years since then!
The business is the business. It might be stupid, but it’s not inaccurate. If Disney goes the whole year without a 1B hit, it’s going to be seen as a setback for them.
Disney should take a bigger cue and try to do something different animation-wise. All the movies (starring humans) since Tangled look exactly the same.
You beat me to it. Disney and Pixar animation both have utterly stagnated, being so beholden to their established brand and look. It’s animation! It can be anything, so why do the same thing again and again, stylistically? Even old school Disney recognized the importance of mixing up the visuals, and when you compare the Big Five, they each are very different from the other in terms of style. Meanwhile, you have films like Nimona, or the projects coming out of Cartoon Saloon, made with a fraction of the budget, yet they have so much more inspiration in the visuals.
The crazy thing is that there are a raft of ‘Spark Shorts’ on D+ that show that Pixar artists DO have a huge range of art styles and storytelling. But apparently, none of them are worthy of a greenlight.
Similarly, with Lin Manuel Miranda doing all the music and every movie needing its own “Let It Go,” they’ve started to all sound the same, too. Makes me miss the days of Brother Bear where they’d take risks even if they didn’t pay off.
Lin Manuel Miranda only wrote music for Moana and Encanto (and additional lyrics for live action Little Mermaid at Alan Menken’s request). He didn’t write Let It Go and he didn’t write the music for Wish, their upcoming release. He wrote the music for Vivo which is an underrated Sony release, but that’s about it for animation music.
I’m aware of this. The music in Moana and Encanto sounds very similar. These movies also each have a torch song, like “Let It Go,” which would be “How Far I’ll Go” and “Waiting on a Miracle,” respectively. That first sentence in my post relates two different reasons the movies sound the same — a composer whose style is very distinctive AND a song type that’s become cliche at this point. My point is about things looking and sounding the same, and about how it was nice when there were sometimes Disney movies where all the characters didn’t sing and dance. Each movie felt different and like its own thing.
For me, almost every aspect of Brother Bear is perfect…except for the music. That Phil Collins soundtrack is hard to listen to.
Similar to the Lin Manuel Miranda issue, using a composer with a very distinctive style for more than one movie starts to have a lot of diminishing returns in terms of fresh and different a soundtrack is. They should have been happy with the Tarzan soundtrack and given someone else a go.
Turning Red had a unique art and writing style compared to the rest of
Pixar and Disney rewarded its innovation by pulling it from theaters and
dumping it on a streaming service.
This article is probably a bit unfair to Pixar, who I would say still does a ton of work in character design, aesthetic, attention to detail…everything we want. Elemental seems more of an issue with the fact that someone greenlit yet another story of “What if X was actually a bureaucracy” or something, and the themes feel a little too same-y. But everyone I know who’ve seen it says it’s gorgeous and the animation is the reason to see it.
Luca had very different character designs, as did Soul. The problem with Pixar really is they set their own high water mark and are struggling to achieve beyond that, plus the fact that they were the rabbit all the greyhounds were chasing – and eventually the greyhounds catch up.
I do think Sony especially has the capability based off buzz alone to set a new dynasty of animation, but that division of theirs doesn’t have nearly the same amount of money to play with as Disney did in the late 80’s, I assume.
Luca was real good. Kinda unfairly forgotten.
Luca, Soul, and Turning Red all had unique art styles and all were dumped on Disney+ and denied a theatrical release. Disney screwed the studio over at a time when they can’t afford to take any more losses. Foolish.
Have you just forgotten the whole pandemic?
Which is what would have happened with Nimona had they kept it in house, and all the think pieces would have been how terrible it was that that this film got dumped on a streaming service. Comparing apples to apples, Disney has been streaming these amazing films for years and the same talking heads have been complaining about them doing exactly what Netflix is doing now.
Honestly, I think if anything is failing it’s Pixar trailers, tbh. I think they might be at a place where people need a bit more clarity from the trailer of what the movie actually is – Luca had a similar issue, imo. Elemental is far less about “What if X was actually a bureaucracy” and much more about the struggle to live your own life when you feel a sense of duty to your parents and their sacrifices with a side helping of the prejudices of older generations aren’t actually built on fact. It’s not their best film, but there’s more there than I think has been reported. A better trailer might have lent itself to at least a marginally better result.
Maybe, but we don’t want to give away the big reveal that the true villain is (rustles papers, coughs) a lack of infrastructure spending.Plus we have to work in as many puns into the trailer as we can. Puns for the Pun God.I think Elemental didn’t know which audience to try and please, and thus ended up pleasing no one to the point where they’d enthusiastically recommend.
To your point of “What if X was actually a bureaucracy?” Inside Out, Soul, and Elemental look like the same movie on paper. I have no interest in watching that take yet again. The last Pixar movie I thoroughly enjoyed was Coco. Toy Story 4, Soul, and Onward were entertaining, but nowhere near as good as Pixar at its peak.
I remember watching Onward and kinda just wishing Pixar got a license to make an actual D&D movie. They’re very, very committed to “What if X but with a little twist” and it gets exhausting. I get that it’s part of their dynamic from day one (what if toys could talk) but, like…there’s nothing wrong with doing something a bit more simple.
It really feels like websites are trying to push Nimona to be more popular than it is. Folks I know who have watched it said it’s nothing special, and I trust their judgement over websites who really want to find ways to write “Disney bad!”
It’s good. It’s really good. But you clearly don’t want to hear that.
I think this also helps put to rest the argument that Disney’s problems come down to them being too ‘woke’ (as if Disney was ever the progressive bogeyman that their conservative detractors made them out to be). Disney’s problems are that they’ve mostly become stale.
Not really. The blanket comparison to Disney doesn’t make much sense given the lack of data on how viewed this actually was. Comparing a straight to streaming release of a movie we have no data for to a full theatrical release we have box office numbers for is disingenuous at best. It’s not even close to the same metric being used to call something successful. It does actually look like right wing boycotts are starting to become a meaningful thing that directly effect the bottom line on profits for some things. It’s not wide spread yet, but them actually hitting Bud Light where it hurts will likely embolden them to expand these types of boycotts and they may start becoming a big deal for some businesses.
“Elemental had the lowest opening weekend box-office total in Pixar history, continuing a streak of underperforming titles like Strange World and Lightyear.”Strange World wasn’t a Pixar production.
I’m glad that Nimona was able to see the light of day despite the odds against it. I can tell you that as an artist who has worked on projects that have been quietly shelved, its a bummer when your work is not only not shown, but you can’t legally show the work you did on it.As far as the movie itself, I really liked the style of it and they designed around the budget that they had. The exposition done with animated subway tiles was really well done and many NYers will recognize the reference to the B line animation. I wish they got a little more money so they could have tightened up on the lighting a bit. You can always tell a CG projects budget by simple things like how the teeth sit inside of character’s mouths (teeth tend to be glowy and never seemed to be shadowed enough). That being said, I thought the character designs were fantastic as well as the color.
Hey, would you mind expanding on this a bit beyond just teeth? It’s been long enough since I kept up with modeling/lighting tech that I struggle to know what to look for.
Based on just the teeth thing, can I basically extrapolate to “examine shadow quality?”
I’m afraid that’s not my expertise, so I only have a cursory understanding of what the lighting department does and what is possible and not possible by budget restraints. I do mostly lighting concepts when I work on CG shows – the lighting department does the hard part of getting what I make into a reality
I watched this with my kids. While the story beats will feel awfully familiar to anyone with decades of movie watching under their belts, Nimona definitely stands apart for its characters and animation. The visual language feels different from anything the Disney/Pixar/Dreamworks machines have churned out. And it is not a film for Middle America (or China). But that’s what makes it special. Yes, I fell asleep during the slow, predictable middle portion (I’m old. Shut up.) But the movie sticks the landing. The ending is sweet and feels earned.
I would argue that while the overall beats felt rote, the details of how they played out were very unique. For instance, Nimona refusing to answer essentialist questions in any way but “I am Nimona” is something I’ve never seen before.
Usually that beat plays out as “they don’t want to talk about their tragic backstory, it’ll come out around the end of act 2.” Indeed, we do learn a backstory (Glorith’s, specifically) but Nimona is just Nimona.
I’m not going to lose sleep over Disney losing money, but it really pisses me off when I see some fuck mook attribute Disney’s failure to them “going woke” rather than not telling original, compelling stories.
Why not both ? “Going woke” antagonize part of the audience (I don’t know how much but something not marginal). There is no reason to be political in a kids movie. If that’s what they chose they need to assume their choices. Some people will love it and some won’t, that’s the game. Disney is supposed to be consensual, that’s how you make big money.
That’s a lot of words to devote to a movie AVC chose not to review.I think it would have gotten a B or maybe B+ if it had b/c while the story is solid the 3rd act felt like the writers had too many themes for a single movie, or at least certain themes brought up in the 3rd act weren’t really given enough breathing room.
We (my 12 and 10 yr-old daighters, wife, me) REALLY enjoyed Nimona, although my older daughter was disappointed it strayed from the source material to make it a little more family-friendly and the characters more sympathetic. And the kids got the message about the fluidity of self-identity. Good stuff.
Ballister and his boyfriend, Ambrosius Goldenloin (Eugene Lee Yang).Question: is it supposed to be “Goldenloin,” or did the author misspell “Goldenlion”?
Nah. It IS indeed Goldenloin.
In the original graphic novel, it’s explained as supposed to have been Goldenlion but then there was a typo that no one caught at the time. In both media, there is the suggestion that Ambrosius didn’t try very hard to correct it.
Goldenloin also has a codpiece in the comic, and Nimona shapeshifts into a news reporter at one point to make a joke about how he’s “compensating for something”.
One of the only upsides to this being released on streaming instead of in theatres is that there’s apparently closeted queer kids watching this away from their homophobic parents, kids who might not have otherwise gotten to see it (or anything with canonically queer content) at all. And my heart goes out to them, that situation sucks.
Nimona is great, but I don’t think you can rightly say that it would have performed better than Elemental or Ruby Gilman without actually…releasing it. Nimona is certainly the better movie, but it’s also playing a different game. I feel pretty confident that if Elemental had been free to stream on D+ it would have done well.This also seems to have a very short memory. Luca, Soul and Turning Red were all well-received by critics. Encanto got a slow start in theaters and then was fully embraced on streaming. The teaser for Wish looks pretty good.
And if it had been released, it would have performed at roughly Strange World numbers. I liked Strange World and saw it in the theatre, but there’s only so much you can expect from a departure from the ordinary.
Eh, it’s really not all that much of a departure from the ordinary, though.It’s still a YA story with knights and dragons. The very, very slight deconstruction of having the dragon be the victim is not actually all that strange in a post-Shrek world.
Strange World also got fuck-all marketing. A lot of people only knew it even existed after it was released. Disney seems happy to invest in making these films (or in Nimona’s case, not so much), but doesn’t want to invest in actually marketing the damned things.
Agreed. I’m usually pretty plugged in to what movies are coming out, but I first heard about Strange World by reading the avclub review the day before release.
I’ll start by saying I genuinely agree with all the points in this article. That said, Disney could just as well decide to take its lessons from the Mario movie – the one that made a billion dollars – which are very different lessons; stick to known IP, make super-safe narrative choices, have an approachable, recognisable art style and load up on celebrity voices. I hope that’s not the path they take, because Mario was a very average film, but you can see the rationale.
A very average film would be already a huge improvement.
They should be going to Dana Terrace with a big bottomless bag of money and begging her to create The Owl House: The College Years.
I just came here to say I love this movie so much and want to see more Nimona adventures!
I’m absolutely shocked that webseries like Nimona are not being scooped up en masse by animation studios eager to capitalize on the webcomic explosion. They come with their own fandoms primed and ready for hype.I can think of a number of story/character focused webcomics and online graphic novels that would make excellent movies or animated series: Wilde Life, Girl Genius, Modest Medusa, Selkie (though someone else would have to draw it, the author’s art quality is horrible), the list goes on. It would also set the precedent that doing independent art projects can be a way to recognition and profit.