Nimona (2023)

Nimona carries a production history that functions as its own indictment: cancelled at Blue Sky, reportedly softened over its queer content, then rescued by Annapurna and Netflix with the romance left standing. The film is brisk, warm, and genuinely funny, and its progressive instincts are woven into the story instead of stapled on top. The central relationship between Ballister and Ambrosius is openly romantic, the kiss survives to the final cut, and the voice cast is stocked with performers chosen with evident intent. The leads were reworked as men of color, modeled on their actors, and the supporting roster includes RuPaul, Indya Moore, and Julio Torres. This is casting as statement, though a quiet one.

The film's feminism is more ambient than argued. Gloreth is a revered warrior heroine and Nimona is a girl-shaped agent of chaos, but the story never organizes itself around gender as a thesis. The prejudice Nimona suffers reads as a broad allegory about fearing the other, applicable to race without ever naming it. Her shapeshifting and her refusal to hold one form invite readings about self-acceptance and bodily autonomy, and her inability to fit any social mold is easy to map onto neurodivergence. The film never says any of this aloud. It trusts the metaphor to do the work, which is both its grace and its limitation.

Where the film grows more insistent is in its treatment of history and its closing sermon. The founding legend of Gloreth slaying the Great Black Monster is exposed as a lie, and the revered ancestor becomes a frightened child who betrayed a friend. That is a tidy act of myth demolition, delivered with the solemnity of a monument being toppled. The final act leans hard on its message about tolerance and judging by appearances, charming enough to disguise the lecture, but a lecture nonetheless. The villain is an authoritarian traditionalist, not a capitalist, so the class politics stay mild. Environmental concerns are entirely absent. A pleasant film, then, and a careful one.