Screenshot: Blue Sky Studios
Today Netflix announced that Nimona is finally getting his chance on screen. Written by ND Stevenson, the story is about a changing girl who convinces her best friend/liege lord to strive for greater and greater glory, and is set in a medieval science fantasy land. So how did we go from webcomic to feature film?
The road to release was…interesting to say the least. What began as Stevenson’s college-age thesis in 2012 has now become a hugely well-received and popular international comics phenomenon, effectively boosting Stevenson’s career and then pushing her off the page and onto the screen when she took over the position of showrunner of Netflix landed She-Ra and the Princesses of Power.
In 2014, after it became clear that Nimona, the self-published webcomic, was a hit, traditional publishing knocked on the door. The complete comic is indexed in a Harper Collins Complete Edition. io9 revealed the cover of Nimona, the graphic novel, back in 2014. You can read this if you want to read an old interview with Stevenson where he goes into detail about the origin of the character and at the end of the interview: even mentions that he would “love” an animated film.
Fox stopped by not much later. In 2015, the first announcement for the Nimona film adaptation was made. But there were some production delays, and in 2019 Disney acquired Fox and Blue Sky Studios, the animation space Nimona was working on. The film was pushed back from February 2020 to March 2021 and then to January 2022. Then, in February 2021, Disney announced it was closing Blue Sky Studios and Nimona was shelved, though production said it was “75%” done with the film. Employees also said Disney executives urged them to remove a gay kiss from the film, which came to light after backlash from Disney’s response to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law.
Some of this footage was given to io9 via an anonymous tip. You can watch the 42 second clip below.
This may have been the only part of Nimona that ever saw the light of day, other than Netflix announced today that it will be releasing the film. Annapurna, the production company behind Missing Link, will complete the film.
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It’s not clear how much of this footage will be used in the upcoming film, but the color palette and background visible in some of the footage matches the single shot featured in the Stevenson and Netflix Twitter posts with the announcement unveiled this morning. We see a lot of test footage from Lord Ballister Blackheart, who is said to be the narrator of this story; He watches his sidekick Nimona, who encourages him to fight the evil university that has wronged Blackheart. Blackheart will be voiced by Riz Ahmed and Chloë Grace Moretz will voice Nimona.
Also of note is the new design for Ambrosious Goldenloin, whose hair and facial features have been drastically changed beyond the webcomic’s simplified character design. This indicates that even in 2020 when this film was being developed, the production always aimed to make Goldenloin a male of Asian descent. Goldenloin is voiced by Eugene Yang. And now? Now we can watch the whole movie. And I know it’s gonna be amazing. Nimona will be available on Netflix in 2023.
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