Aurelia Butler

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    How ‘Nimona’ Helped Its Creator Explore His Emerging Identity

    The graphic novelist ND Stevenson wrote the trans allegory long before he came out. When it was time to adapt it for a new film, he was ready to go further.In the new Netflix animated film “Nimona,” the titular character makes its first appearance as a redheaded teenage girl before transforming into a charging rhino, then a grizzly, then a songbird and so on, with brief stopovers as a gorilla, an ostrich and an armadillo.After Ballister Boldheart (voiced by Riz Ahmed) a prim, by-the-book knight, asks her, “Can you please just be normal for a second?” he wonders if all that shape-shifting hurts. “Honestly? I feel worse when I don’t do it,” Nimona (Chloë Grace Moretz) replies.ND Stevenson, who wrote and drew the graphic novel on which the film is based, said he had always loved shape-shifters. But his animated film explores elements of the trans experience — the clumsy questions from well-meaning friends, the outright hatred from strangers — only hinted at in his award-winning book, a beloved staple of the L.G.B.T.Q. literary canon.“The themes have their roots in the comic,” Stevenson explained. “But it would be years before I came out as gay, years before I came out as trans. Narratives have been my way of exploring those identities, even as allegory.”The film brings those themes to the fore at a time when trans rights have come increasingly under attack. “We knew what we were doing,” Stevenson said of the filmmakers. “We knew what we wanted to say.”“But even back then,” he continued, “I don’t think any of us knew how bleak things were going to get, the backlash against trans and queer people, and how much the movie was going to speak to that.”In “Nimona,” the title character is a shape-shifter who joins forces with a lovelorn knight. Netflix“Nimona” focuses on the budding friendship between Nimona and Ballister, who is wrongly accused of murdering his queen. The film also features a sweet, star-crossed romance between Ballister, who is already mistrusted because he’s a commoner among nobles, and Ambrosius Goldenloin, a dreamy, lovesick knight (Eugene Lee Yang).“This is a story that is, at its heart, a love letter to anybody who’s ever felt different or misunderstood,” said Troy Quane, who directed the movie along with Nick Bruno.The film had its beginnings in 2015, the same year the book was published, and is that rarest of Hollywood literary makeovers. For decades, gay characters and relationships in literary classics were straightwashed on the big screen, whether in “The Maltese Falcon” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” or “Fried Green Tomatoes” and “The Color Purple.”In “Nimona,” the story became more queer friendly on its way to Hollywood, not less.For Stevenson, much of the book spoke to his own upbringing and experiences. “Coming from a really conservative family and the evangelical church in the South,” he said, “the story is definitely a reaction to that.”On a recent afternoon, Stevenson was at the Netflix Animation studio in Burbank discussing how his film came to be. Dressed in a green “Big Sur Monterey County” sweatshirt and flannel trousers, his red hair cut short, Stevenson talked about his background, his beginnings as an artist and how the story morphed — much like the shape-shifting Nimona — on its way from book to screen.Stevenson, 31, was born and raised in Columbia, S.C., the middle child of five siblings. After years of home-schooling and two more at the local high school, he went to the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he began posting Nimona comics online in 2012, a project that became his senior thesis. “When I first started making the comic, I didn’t consider myself a writer,” he said. “I was in school for illustration. But comics was kind of my way of tricking myself into thinking like, no, I am a writer.”Online, the series quickly gained fans, and in graphic novel form, “Nimona” won several awards including an Eisner, the comics industry’s most prestigious honor, and was a National Book Award finalist. Stevenson was 24. That year, Fox Animation acquired the rights to make an animated feature based on the comic, and called on Blue Sky Studios (the “Ice Age” franchise) to make it.The next five years were busy and creative ones. In addition to adapting “Nimona,” Stevenson collaborated with several others in creating and writing “Lumberjanes,” an Eisner-winning comic book series set in a summer camp for “hardcore lady types.” He also became the show runner of the DreamWorks series “She-Ra and the Princesses of Power,” a fantastical, queer-friendly reboot of the 1980s cartoon, which went on to win an Emmy and a GLAAD Media Award.In 2020, Stevenson published the memoir “The Fire Never Goes Out,” a collection of “year in review” comics that run from his college days and subsequent creative triumphs to his marriage, in 2019, to fellow cartoonist and writer Molly Ostertag. In the book, he writes about coming out, the joys of life with Molly, and his struggles with body image and mental health; in several, he draws himself with an enormous hole in the center of his torso or consumed by flames.“I can’t literally grab my emotions and shape them into something that makes sense,” he said. “But I can wrestle with a drawing and try to make it make sense.”“Coming from a really conservative family and the evangelical church in the South, the story is definitely a reaction to that,” Stevenson said.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesMeanwhile, at Blue Sky, the filmmakers worked to find the heart of “Nimona,” a way into a character who was, by definition, ever-changing and hard to define.“It was a difficult thing to capture,” Moretz said. “It was so fun, but I would come home and I would look at my partner and be like, I can’t talk. I can’t do anything but rest.”Early versions, Stevenson said, ended up with Ballister as the focus and Nimona as some sort of manic pixie dream girl, playing second fiddle to the lovelorn knight.Nobody wanted that. Somehow, they had to find the human core of a character who was, in many ways, anything but. “Everybody was very clear that ‘Nimona’ was this universal story, a love story,” Bruno said. “But there was a particular group of people who were really passionate about it, and those were the people at Blue Sky who were members of the LGBTQ+ community.”In group discussions, they were sharing their stories and what the book meant to them. “We thought, why not, if this group feels OK with it, incorporate some of these stories in the film?” Bruno said.In the book, the Ballister-Goldenloin romance is only hinted at. In the film, however, there’s a kiss, an “I love you” between the knights, and even a back story to explain why they’re so nuts about each other in the first place. As for Nimona, the character is not trans, per se (or even, as the filmmakers note, female, although Nimona can be, should the mood strike). But the parallels are there, for those who care to look.In 2021, Disney, which had acquired Blue Sky in its acquisition of Fox, shuttered the studio and “Nimona” with it, only two days before a planned screening for the cast and crew. “Just like that, 450 people were out of a job,” Stevenson recalled. “It was heartbreaking.”The team decided to go ahead with the screening, a premiere of sorts as well as a goodbye. “No one wanted to click out of the Zoom meeting,” Quane recalled.The following year, after the creators spent months shopping the project, Annapurna Pictures opted to revive the film. “We all got together and just wanted to cry, because we were like, Nimona survived,” Moretz said. “It was such a testament to who she is, and her resilience.”If you want to watch the film as a trans allegory, there’s certainly a lot there. But if you just want to watch a beautifully animated adventure story filled with castles and knights and laser cannons and flying cars, starring a shape-shifting force of nature who likes to blow stuff up, there’s that, too. Stevenson thinks there’s room for both readings.“My opinions of that continue to evolve,” said Stevenson, who is working on developing “Lumberjanes” and a project based on a novel he wrote at 15. “On the one hand, I think that explicit representation is really, really important. But I also know there’s certain media that I never would have gotten to read as a kid if it had been marketed that way.”“I think if I were making the comic now, there’s a lot more I would have done with it, and it’s cool to see the movie do that,” he continued. “But I also think there’s a certain power in having a story that clearly expresses that, but maybe flies under the radar of parents who might be less willing to put that book in their kids’ hands.” More

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    ‘Every Body’ Review: Celebrating the ‘I’ in L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+

    The documentary follows three openly intersex people, set against the larger backdrop of decades of secrecy and unnecessary surgeries.In medical literature, intersex is a term used to describe individuals who are born with physical, chromosomal or hormonal characteristics that are consistent with both male and female sex traits. In the world, intersex people are the “I” in L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+, and they have built a community around common political interests. The warmly engaging documentary “Every Body” follows three interview subjects, all of whom are openly intersex. The film’s subjects — Sean Saifa Wall, River Gallo and Alicia Roth Weigel — discuss their personal medical histories and place their experiences in context with a larger political fight for intersex bodily autonomy.As intersex people, Wall, Gallo and Weigel share the common experience of receiving medically unnecessary surgery intended to bring their physical appearance in line with the gender identity that was assigned to them at birth. They were told as children to keep their medical status secret. Now, as adults, all three engage in political activism to put an end to such medically unnecessary surgeries.The film benefits from its choice of subjects, as Wall, Gallo and Weigel are all endearing and deeply informed. Their candor animates the unimaginative talking head interview footage from the director Julie Cohen (“RBG”). But beyond casting, Cohen’s best directorial choice is to show examples from the history of intersex medical care.Cohen highlights the influence of Dr. John Money, a Johns Hopkins psychologist who helped to establish the standard for treatment of intersex individuals. The film compellingly uses clips from the interview program “Dateline” to show the devastation that was inflicted upon David Reimer, the most famous of Money’s patients. The contrast between Reimer’s archived grief and the hope of the film’s interview subjects is powerful, effectively demonstrating the life and death stakes of intersex liberation.Every BodyRated R for nudity. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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    On Her Debut Album, Olivia Dean Is Already Pushing Ahead

    The 24-year-old English songwriter moves beyond sleek pop-soul songwriting on “Messy.”Olivia Dean could easily have stayed in one lane for her debut album, “Messy.” She has been on a glide path to a career in smooth English pop-soul. She’s a creamy-toned, jazz-tinged singer and a heartsore but resilient lyricist, grounded in classic verse-chorus-bridge songwriting.Dean, 24, has been releasing songs since 2018 — long enough to make her first album feel like a turning point instead of an introduction. It reaffirms what she’s been doing right; it also claims new possibilities.She was born in London — to a Guyanese-Jamaican mother and an English father — and soaked up music from her father’s album collection. (Her middle name is Lauryn, after Lauryn Hill.) She sang in a gospel choir and took musical-theater classes. And like Amy Winehouse, Adele, Leona Lewis, Raye, Jessie J and Imogen Heap, Dean showed enough youthful talent to attend the star-making BRIT School of performing arts.Like other newcomers, Dean gained attention for a featured vocal with an electronic act, performing “Adrenaline” with Rudimental in 2019. She was already building her own songs with collaborators. By now, with a series of EP releases and two million Spotify followers, Dean has amassed enough fans — among them Elton John — to have performed at the 2023 Glastonbury festival.“Messy” makes clear Dean’s pop-soul expertise. She gives vintage Memphis soul a sleek electronic gloss in “The Hardest Part,” a song she released in 2020 that has been streamed tens of millions of times and reappears on “Messy.” (She also released a remix that has her trading verses with Leon Bridges.) The song is about understanding — with regret and relief — that she has outgrown a youthful romance. “Lately I’ve been growing into someone you don’t know,” she sings. “You had the chance to love her, but apparently you don’t.”The album also flaunts soul craftsmanship with “Dive,” a plush, string-topped ballad about giving in to infatuation. The push-and-pull melody shows the influence of Winehouse, one of Dean’s obvious models. But in Dean’s songs, she usually reaches toward positive thinking and self-care instead of Winehouse’s dark humor.Another retro soul song, the Motown-flavored, cowbell-tapping “Ladies Room,” offers a decidedly post-Motown idea: that even as part of a couple, a woman is entitled to independence and time by herself. “I love being in your space/But sometimes I need some room,” she explains.While Dean doesn’t abandon pop-soul, “Messy” determinedly tests other possibilities. The title song — which allows that a little imperfection is OK and insists, “I’m on your side” — approaches psych-folk, with low-fi guitar and piano and apparitional sounds and voices. “No Man” bemoans an emotionally distant partner in a moody, time-warped ballad, layering electronic percussion and mournful strings. She opens the album with “UFO,” which merges folky strumming with Vocoder-processed vocal harmonies, as Dean plays an alien: “I need somewhere to land/I might as well fall into your earthly hands.”Throughout the album, the songwriting stays old-school: straightforward melodies and lyrics, clear structures, no jump-cut transitions, not even a guest rapper. And while Dean’s songs concentrate on relatable matters of the heart, she ends the album with a declaration of her own distinct identity.“Carmen” is a tribute to Dean’s grandmother, who came to England from Guyana in the wave of Caribbean immigration that’s now called the Windrush generation. It’s an upbeat march, with steel drum and carnival horns in the mix. “No way to know, how to make a home/In someone else’s motherland,” Dean sings. “You transplanted a family tree/And a part of it grew into me.” The song is as polished as everything else on the album. But it’s willing to get a little personal, too.Olivia Dean“Messy”(Island) More

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    ‘Umberto Eco’ Review: Remembering a Literary Explorer

    A new documentary delves into the infectious curiosity and passions of the Italian scholar and author of “The Name of the Rose.”“To be intellectually curious is to be alive,” Umberto Eco once said. The Italian thinker, who died in 2016, was a professor, a novelist — who wrote, most notably and at one time inescapably, “The Name of the Rose” — a semiotician, a columnist and a connoisseur of arcana. He also conveyed a twinkling sense of fun around reading and thinking about the world and literature, a notion that erudition could be not just edifying but entertaining.“Umberto Eco: A Library of the World” celebrates the man and his many bookshelves, but it’s his symbolic appeal that comes across above all. Davide Ferrario’s documentary front-loads the physicality of books, with drooling pans of libraries from Turin, Italy, to Tianjin, China, before easing into Eco’s eclectic interests, with clips of him dispensing aperçus and quips about memory and the noise of modernity.Eco’s passion for the literary canon is clear, but we hear more about his wanderings through his favorite oddities, such as Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century Jesuit scholar who wrote sprawling and sometimes wrongheaded treatises. Well-intentioned dramatic readings from Eco’s writings are punctuated with fond anecdotes from his children and a grandson that burnish the image of Eco as the extravagant scholar. His love of arcana supplies an outward eccentricity that seems to interest the film more than his semiotic work or political commentary (in which he was a critic of Silvio Berlusconi since the 1990s).Eco’s 1980 debut novel, “The Name of the Rose,” a murder mystery set in a 14th-century monastery, became a surprise runaway success. Eco neatly describes the appeal of such detective-style investigation as being essentially spiritual, asking, who is behind all this?; he’d continue with more esoteric adventures like “Foucault’s Pendulum” (1988). Throughout his work, the frisson of fiction and its assorted deceptions attracted Eco, from speculative travelogues to the phenomenon of lying.Viewers (and readers) of a certain age may come away wondering whether Eco’s profile has faded somewhat. Ferrario’s documentary presents a figure who feels more firmly European than international, not to mention old-fashioned. (He was definitely a guy who liked to explain his scorn for his cellphone.) But exploring fictional worlds with Eco for a guide remains a diverting and often enlightening pursuit.Umberto Eco: A Library of the WorldNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken’ Review: Coming of Age is a Sea Change

    The newest animated adventure from DreamWorks follows a high schooler who transforms into a giant tentacled sea creature.The protagonist of the clunkily named “Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken,” a DreamWorks production directed by Kirk DeMicco, is a headstrong high schooler with a secret: She and her family are aquatic animals passing as humans. Desperate to fit into the social scene in her seaside town, Ruby (voiced by Lana Condor) dutifully keeps up the ruse, but gripes about her parents’ cardinal rule against going in the ocean.One day, the teen tumbles into the waves and realizes their reason: Upon submergence, Ruby, like her mother (Toni Collette) and grandmother (Jane Fonda) before her, metamorphoses into a colossal tentacled sea creature. This device — conspicuously like the one in Pixar’s “Turning Red” — would be enough to motor a movie. “I’m a monster,” Ruby exclaims after a destructive mishap on terra firma, sending the needle on the viewer’s gauge for puberty metaphors flying into the red.But in this chaotic, family-friendly affair, a lone figurative image amid teenage drama will not do. Ruby soon ditches the shore, and her stresses expand to involve conniving mermaids, a salty, peg-legged seaman (Will Forte) and a magic trident tucked inside a submarine volcano. Not even the matriarchal link at the story’s center feels satisfying, its good intention strangled by the plotty chaos.Some evocative visual detail helps unify Ruby’s unruly world. The architectural design in her coastal hamlet is a considered hybrid of midcentury modern and nautical kitsch, and characters’ facial expressions are richly emotive. Underwater aesthetics are sadly sparer, accentuating the fluorescent marine fauna. Lurid neon blobs, like celebrity voice actors, seem a prerequisite for animated adventures these days.Ruby Gillman, Teenage KrakenRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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    A Queer Revolutionary Classic Book, Now Onstage With Music

    Philip Venables and Ted Huffman’s latest work adapts a utopian, fantasy cult favorite by Larry Mitchell.Many operas in the standard repertoire are based on fairy tales and fantasy. But few of those describe a global queer-feminist revolution, and fewer still have main characters whose names begin with “Warren” and end with an unusual moniker for a genital appendage.Both can be found in “The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions,” a new piece of music theater by the composer Philip Venables and the writer-director Ted Huffman. After premiering at the Manchester International Festival on Thursday, it will travel, with its original roster of 15 performers, to the Aix-en-Provence Festival in early July, then elsewhere, including NYU Skirball in New York this fall.Venables and Huffman’s two previous collaborations — the operas “4.48 Psychosis,” based on Sarah Kane’s play about mental illness and suicide, and “Denis & Katya,” about teenage lovers in Russia who died in a 2016 livestreamed standoff with Russian police — have won them acclaim as artists who find beauty at the extremes of form and subject matter.Their new show, freely adapted from a gay liberation fantasy novel of the same name that was self-published by the activist Larry Mitchell in 1977, is both a continuation of that broader project and, as Venables said dryly in a video interview, “a tonal shift.”The piece, like the novel, covers thousands of years of human history, telling the story of the rise of an imperialist capitalist patriarchy called Ramrod; the resistance to that patriarchy by the sexual and racial Others it has created; and its eventual defeat by a revolutionary queer coalition.Katherine Goforth, front left, with Eric Lamb in rehearsal for the show, which will travel to NYU Skirball this fall.Tristram Kenton“There are two important things to remember about the coming revolutions,” this fairy tale reads, on the page and onstage. “The first is that we will get our [expletive] kicked. The second is that we will win.”Over the show’s 90 minutes, Rosie Elnile’s deceptively simple, bare stage becomes a model of this improvisatory, revolutionary utopia. Everything you hear, you see: The 15 performers play a largely memorized score on a mixed ensemble of baroque and modern instruments. A harpsichord, a theorbo and a viola da gamba sound alongside an upright piano and an electric organ.The result is a romp through history that’s both joyous and politically serious. “These stories of oppression and resistance are performed with and for each other,” Venables said, “as part of our processing of and resistance to oppression.” And the piece proposes and enacts the destruction of what it calls “the men’s categories” — the classifications of race, gender, expertise and taste that, it argues, stop the global majority from becoming free.“We all, at some stage in a utopia, want to get past identity politics to this universalism,” Venables said.The actor-choreographer Yandass, who narrates large portions of the show, said in a video interview that the show’s form echoes its politics: “Everyone is multiskilled in so many ways. I would imagine that’s how the utopia that’s dreamed of in this piece would be, everyone having different talents, having to rely on each other for cues, engaging in real teamwork.”The actor-choreographer Yandass, who narrates portions of the show.Tristram KentonWhen Mitchell wrote his book, he was inspired by Lavender Hill, a gay commune that he was a founding member of in Ithaca, N.Y. Such communes, which rejected both straight society and a gay movement that they saw as consumerist and assimilationist, peppered late 1970s and early 1980s America. They were places filled with political theorizing, collective cultural expression, and folk and baroque music. “Carl later gave the visiting harpsichordist a copy of ‘Eros and Civilization,’” reads a representative quote from a diary of life at a mid-1970s commune in the gay liberation journal RFD.Activists — many of whom, like Mitchell, settled on the word “faggot” to imply a gender-expansive, sex-positive and politically radical gay subjectivity — believed that collective movement had the power to change the world, and that folk and baroque dances were forms infused with political radicalism.In a video interview, Venables called this a “politics of pleasure and joy and play and community,” one he has sought to express in a musical style in which “form and genre are a way of putting on costumes and telling stories, with folk and baroque music references having to do with community music making, social gatherings and social rituals.”One aria, for example, starts as a duet between the soprano Mariamielle Lamagat and the harpist Joy Smith, before the gambist Jacob Garside joins in — on glockenspiel, and wearing a multicolored evening gown — helping to initiate a transformation of the tune into a swinging bossa nova, and eventually an accordion-accompanied shanty.Kit Green said that the production gives the sense “that we are a part of something bigger.”Tristram KentonThe book that inspired all this — despite, or perhaps because of, how rooted it is in its specific political moment — has had a recent revival. After years of being out of print, with copies and PDFs circulating among gay artists and activists like samizdat, it was republished in 2018.“I had questions about how Ted wanted to stage it because it felt uncomfortable doing some halcyon utopian thing set in the 1970s,” said Kit Green, one of the show’s narrators. “He is doing it in a way, though, where we are not part of the book. We’re telling it; there’s a distance. We’re on this massive time continuum, and when things feel hopeless, this sense that time rolls on, that we are a part of something bigger, feels different and exciting. We need that revolutionary zeal — but what does it mean now? We should all be asking that question.”As the performers gathered onstage during a dress rehearsal this week, Yshani Perinpanayagam — the music director, as well as a member of the cast — said: “There have been so many beautiful moments of connection today on- and off-set. If something doesn’t go as expected, just yes/and it. Go with it.”In the show, feats of technical bravado — in one early scene, Garside plays complex music on gamba while lying on his back on a blanket being dragged across the stage — are paired with simpler collective actions, like an aria accompanied both by the trained violin playing of Conor Gricmanis, as well as by much of the cast playing on the open strings of violins, a simple echoing of harmonies. Perinpanayagam gives some cues, but mostly the musicians play without a conductor.From left, Kerry Bursey, Collin Shay, Conor Gricmanis and Yshani Perinpanayagam in rehearsal.Tristram Kenton“We wanted to make it feel like a community onstage, to try to break down some of the hierarchies and traditional relationships that different art forms have onstage, especially classical music stages,” Huffman said in a video interview. “Asking everyone onstage to participate in everything is not a spirit of amateurism but of willingness to test one’s creativity, of finding beauty in simple things.”The challenge of the score, the flutist Eric Lamb said, is in “the physicality, the movement.” He added that he hoped audiences would “witness this love and understanding of 15 people onstage who inhabit various spaces within the queer community holding each other up and caring for each other.”These artists believe that the revolutions the piece aims to incite are both current and urgent. “Everything that I’d thought about my life made sense,” Yandass said, describing reading the book for the first time. “This is how I should have been living. I felt called out in terms of not sticking to my queerness, not sticking to my being. It helped me understand my thinking and my instincts.”Green mentioned the final section — in which the performers scream, “And the third revolution engulfs us all!” — and added, “I had a proper feeling of ‘Let’s do this! Let’s go out and start it!’” More

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    ‘Nimona’ Review: Fright the Power

    A zingy, chintzy, idea-driven animated feature based on the ND Stevenson comic.Imagine Bugs Bunny blended with the Joker and you’ll get a sense of Nimona, an impish, shape-shifting villain who presents as a pink-haired, miniskirted punk but prefers to buck description. “I’m not a girl, I’m a shark!” Nimona (voiced by a vibrant Chloë Grace Moretz) insists. At will, Nimona is also an otter, ostrich, rhinoceros, gorilla, girl-shaped humanoid, boy-shaped humanoid, kitty cat, pizza rat and blue whale who swallows its enemies and squirts them out of its blowhole with a filthy snicker.Likewise, “Nimona,” a zingy, chintzy, idea-driven animated feature, was once a Tumblr comic, an art school thesis and an award-winning graphic novel (all three incarnations by the author ND Stevenson). Then, in 2021, it became an internet cri de coeur when Disney shut down production on a feature. Annapurna and Netflix stepped in, and the final film version, directed by Nick Bruno and Troy Quane from a script by Robert L. Baird and Lloyd Taylor, is a rush job with little resemblance to the much bleaker web comic. But it’s a vivid creature all its own.The story is set in a futuro-medieval walled city with jumbotrons and knights who say, “Bro.” Fear has reigned for a millennium, ever since the hero Gloreth battled back a monster. Now, Gloreth’s Valkyrie-esque statue looms large over the populace, casting a shadow that extends over billboards that blare, “If you see something, slay something,” and an outlaw knight, Ballister Boldheart (Riz Ahmed), cowering in disgrace from a wrongful accusation of regicide.Ballister yearns to be once again embraced by the kingdom, and his ex, the lustily named Ambrosius Goldenloin (Eugene Lee Yang), who broke Ballister’s heart and sliced off his arm. Enter Nimona, a bloodthirsty wrecking ball who wants to use Ballister to destroy the entire system. To do so, Nimona brings further shame upon the exile, even publicly claiming that Ballister likes — Egads! — freestyle jazz.At first, the look (particularly the lifeless backgrounds) is so slapdash that you’re tempted to flee. But jokes litter the film like scattered Legos, making you hesitate long enough to appreciate how the light glints off Ballister’s armor-plated shoulders. Attention has been paid; it’s just not equally distributed. The tone is uneasy teetering on anarchic, veering from giddily moronic one-liners to — more shockingly — a climax with deep empathy and visual awe.This is a big message film that wants audiences to reflect on social paranoia. At its heart, it’s a pointed allegory about politicians who build their national profile on the backs of queer and transgender children. Nimona the character doesn’t claim to speak for them, but does try to speak to them and to others grappling with the concept of what it might feel like when your shell doesn’t match your soul. “I feel worse when I don’t do it,” Nimona says of metamorphosing, “like my insides are itchy.” But the movie is also willing to poke fun at its own politics when, minutes later, Nimona sabotages a losing game of Monopoly with a comic rant about overthrowing our oppressors, and, as a capper, feigns sudden death.NimonaRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    Will Children Save Us at the End of the World?

    A wave of recent and forthcoming TV series, books and movies meditate on how young people might fare during an apocalyptic event — with varying degrees of optimism.The noxious orange smoke that descended over New York this month reminded me of a parlor game I used to play with my husband: Would we have what it takes to survive the apocalypse? We abruptly stopped enjoying this thought experiment in March 2020 and when I had a child the next year, I became even less tolerant of blithely considering the end of the world. But now, suddenly, versions of our game are everywhere, in a new and near-unavoidable genre: stories that revisit our pandemic trauma via even worse — but plausible! — scenarios. Making these works doubly poignant, many of them have children at their center.Mackenzie Davis in the series “Station Eleven” (2021-22).Ian Watson/HBO MaxThere’s “Station Eleven,” the 2014 novel by Emily St. John Mandel about the aftermath of a swine flu, which was turned into a much-discussed 2021 HBO Max series, in which an 8-year-old girl manages to survive with the help of a stranger turned surrogate parent. “The Last of Us,” HBO’s video game adaptation, which debuted in January, features a zombie-fungus pandemic; a seemingly immune teenage girl is humanity’s one hope. “Leave the World Behind,” Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel — soon to be a movie — about a bourgeois family vacation gone very bad, features a vague but menacing threat of apocalypse. Also loosely belonging to this category are the shows “Yellowjackets” (2021-present) — a girls’ soccer team turns to cannibalism after a plane crash — and “Class of ’07” (2023) — a school reunion coincides with a climate apocalypse — and the new-to-Netflix 2019 Icelandic movie “Woman at War” (a renegade activist tries to stop the destruction of the environment and adopt a child).These stories are, in various ways, about how and whether our children can survive the mess that we’ve left them — and what it will cost them to do so. In “Station Eleven,” post-pans (children who were born after the pandemic) are both beacons of optimism and conscripted killers deployed by a self-styled prophet who hopes to erase anyone who holds on to the trauma of the past. And in “The Last of Us,” Ellie, the young girl with possible immunity (played by the actor Bella Ramsey), is forced to kill to survive, and to grapple with whether it’s worth sacrificing her own life in the search for a cure.The anxieties that these works explore — about planetary destruction and what we did to enable it — are, evidence suggests, affecting the desire of some to have children at all, either because of fear for their future or a belief that not procreating will help stave off the worst. But following the children in these fictions, who didn’t create the conditions of their suffering, isn’t just a devastating guilt trip. Almost all these stories also frame children as our best hope, as we so often do in real life. Children, we need to believe, are resilient and ingenious in ways that adults aren’t. In these stories, when the phones stop working and Amazon stops delivering, it’s children, less set in their ways, who can rebuild and imagine something different. They’re our victims but also our saviors.W. W. Norton & Company, via Associated PressNowhere is this more explicit than in Lydia Millet’s 2020 novel, “A Children’s Bible,” in which a group of middle-aged college friends rent an old mansion for a summer reunion. When a superstorm sets off a chain of events that erodes society, the parents drink and take ecstasy but the kids — teens — remain clearheaded. They care for a baby, grow food and plan for an unrecognizable future. This fantasy of a youth-led solution is both hopeful, Millet implies, and a deplorable shirking of responsibility. (It recalls somewhat Greta Thunberg’s rebuke of grown-ups: “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic.”) Its price, these works suggest, is a childhood robbed of innocence. In the rare moments when kids are allowed to be kids in these narratives, there is always a sense of foreboding; for every romp through an abandoned shopping mall, there’s a zombie lying in wait in a Halloween store. “Is this really all they had to worry about?” Ellie asks Joel, her companion in “The Last of Us” (played by Pedro Pascal), about the teenage girls who lived before the fungus hit. “Boys. Movies. Deciding which shirt goes with which skirt.”Mahershala Ali, Myha’la Herrold, Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke in the forthcoming movie “Leave the World Behind.”JoJo Whilden/NetflixThis current crop of postapocalyptic stories isn’t the first to feature children prominently. Cormac McCarthy’s novel “The Road,” published in 2006, early in the so-called war on terror, followed a father and son after civilization had been leveled by an unnamed flash from the sky. (“Are we still the good guys?” the son asks the father as they ignore others’ pain in their struggle to survive.) The movie “Children of Men,” released the same year, imagines a world so destroyed that most humans have lost the ability to reproduce — and hope lies with the only pregnant woman. Of course, one reason these fictions foreground children is that a world without them is the most doomed world of all. It’s no accident that some of the earliest near-apocalypse stories — the biblical flood, the one in the ancient Mesopotamian poem “The Epic of Gilgamesh” — imagined that the world was saved by bringing the “seed of all living creatures,” as the latter work puts it, onto a boat.But maybe more than any particular fear of a civilization-ending calamity, these fictions are most useful for helping us work through an unavoidable, terrifying truth on an individual level. That the world, in whatever state it descends to or remains in, will go on without us after our death, and unless tragedy strikes, our children will live in it without us. It’s not comforting to imagine, but it can be illuminating. They will navigate things we can’t imagine, but — just maybe — they’ll do better than we did, even without our help. More