Nimona (Movie)

Subterms

    Latest story

    138 Shares159 Views

    How the ‘Spider-Verse’ Influenced the New ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ Movie

    by

    The new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie and other C.G.I. cartoons are taking a looser, imperfect approach. The style represents a shift made possible by Spidey’s success.When “TMNT,” a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated film, was released in 2007, the critic Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in The New York Times that it offered “an impressive lack of visual texture.” She was not wrong. The eponymous reptiles are rendered in an inert computer-generated form, as if they were modeled from plastic and then put on a screen. Their green skin is dull and smooth.The same cannot be said for the turtles in the latest incarnation of the ooze-filled tale: “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.” In this new film, released Wednesday, our heroes — Michelangelo, Donatello, Leonardo and Raphael — appear to spring from a (talented) high school doodler’s notebook. Their bodies and faces are rendered with an imperfect sketchy quality that makes their eyes vivid and their smiles vibrant. Their greenness is distinctive and gains extra contours when reflected in New York’s neon lights.“Mutant Mayhem,” directed by Jeff Rowe, is representative of a larger shift that has occurred in the 16 years since “TMNT” was released. It’s part of a wave of films that proves computer-generated animation doesn’t have to look quite so, well, boring.The turtle heroes in “TMNT,” from 2007, look as though they are molded from plastic.Imagi Animation StudiosThere’s an imperfect quality to the heroes in the new “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.”Paramount PicturesSo what happened? Well, in 2018, “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” was released. “Into the Spider-Verse” — along with its even more technically virtuosic sequel, “Across the Spider-Verse” this summer — bucked the trend of modern animation by invoking its hero’s comic-book origins with Ben-Day dots and wild, hallucinogenic sequences.Since “Into the Spider-Verse” became a box office hit as well as an Oscar winner, major studios have grown less fearful of animation that diverges from the norm. The film proved that audiences wouldn’t reject projects that look markedly different from the house styles of Pixar (“Toy Story”) and DreamWorks (“Shrek”). Films like “Mutant Mayhem,” “The Mitchells vs. The Machines,” “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” and “Nimona” all have distinctive looks that are visually sensational without conforming to established playbooks.It’s exciting for the filmmakers, too. “All animators ever did before that was have lunch with each other and bitch about how all animated movies look the same,” Mike Rianda, director of “The Mitchells,” told me in an interview. (Rianda is a member of SAG-AFTRA and spoke before the strike.)Rianda — who worked on that movie alongside Rowe, its co-director — was developing it at Sony Pictures Animation while “Into the Spider-Verse” was in the works. (Both were produced by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller; “The Mitchells” was eventually released on Netflix in 2021.) “The Mitchells,” about a kooky family’s road trip during an A.I. takeover, looks like a window into the overstimulated mind of its teenage heroine, Katie Mitchell (voiced by Abbi Jacobson), an exuberant film geek — and Rianda and Rowe wanted the animation to have all of her quirks. They felt that the humans should look imperfect and asymmetrical rather than like Pixar’s “The Incredibles,” because the plot concerned a battle between Homo sapiens weirdos and regulated robots. “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” blended techniques from 3-D C.G.I. with hand-drawn animated looks.Sony PicturesStill, there was pressure from the studio to go the standard route. “That’s easy,” Rianda said. “The computer knows how to do that. It’s already been taught that. It was wonderful to have ‘Spider-Verse’ going on in the next room so we could point to it and say, ‘Look, they’re doing it. We can do it too, right?’”Films like “Into the Spider-Verse,” and those that have followed in its footsteps, blend animation techniques that are common in 3-D computer-generated movies with those that were commonplace in the 2-D hand-drawn animation that preceded it. It’s not just that the images are less photorealistic, the movements of the characters are as well. The results are more broadly impressionistic in the ways that Looney Tunes cartoons, Disney classics or decades of anime have been.For instance, when the cat hero of “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” sticks his sword into the thumbnail of a giant in the bravura musical opening sequence, the sky goes yellow as the giant gasps with pain. The giant’s thumb turns red, and white lines reverberate in the background mimicking the throbbing.“The Last Wish,” directed by Joel Crawford, is linked to the era of animation dominated by C.G.I.; it is a spinoff of “Shrek,” a hallmark of that time. For Crawford, “Into the Spider-Verse” showed studios that “audiences were not only accepting of different styles but craved it because you get the same thing over and over.”Crawford wanted to keep Puss recognizable to fans, but put him in the context of a “fairy tale painting.” That meant rendering his fur more as brushstrokes rather than strands. Fur is actually a good barometer of the shift. In the 2022 DreamWorks caper “The Bad Guys,” which follows a group of animal criminals, the wolf ringleader’s coat looks like it has been shaped by pen strokes, a change from the way his fuzzier lupine brethren were crafted in Disney’s 2016 comedy “Zootopia.”With “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” the director Joel Crawford aimed for a “fairy tale painting.”DreamWorks AnimationBut all the animation directors I spoke with argued that the art has to come from a thematically relevant place. For “Nimona,” now on Netflix, the directors Troy Quane and Nick Bruno landed on what they described as a “two-and-a-half-D” style that evoked medieval paintings, a fitting look for their graphic-novel adaptation set in a futuristic world with the chivalrous customs of the Middle Ages. A trailer for Disney’s upcoming “Wish” has an illustrated quality in line with its storybook fable plot about a star descending from the sky. The effect is something out of an Arthur Rackham illustration or a Beatrix Potter book mashed up with “Frozen.”Rowe’s initial goal for “Mutant Mayhem” was just to be as bold as possible, excising any timidity he had felt about pushing boundaries on “The Mitchells.” As he spent more time working on the world of the Turtles, he figured out where those impulses were coming from and how they’d fit into the story. He and the production designer, Yashar Kassai, rediscovered drawings they had done as teenagers. “There’s just this unmitigated expression and honesty to those kinds of drawings,” Rowe said. “It’s a movie about teenagers; that’s our North Star. Let’s commit to the art style looking like it was made by teenagers. Ideally the world and the characters will look like they drew themselves.”As a viewer, I find it’s invigorating to see the animators on “Mutant Mayhem” quite literally coloring outside the lines. When the turtles jump across rooftops, the moon behind them appears to be vibrating scribbles. You can see (digital) pen lines in explosions and expressions.“At first ‘Spider-Verse’ gave people permission,” Rowe said. “And now I think with ‘Spider-Verse 2,’ it’s made it a mandate. I think if anyone makes a film that looks like a C.G. 3-D film from the last 30 years now, it’s going to feel dated.” For audiences, that’s great news. More

    More stories

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Children’s Movies to Stream: ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ and More

      by

      This month’s picks include a stereotype-defying shape-shifter, superpowered shelter pets and the newest “Guardians of the Galaxy” adventure.‘Nimona’Watch it on Netflix.Nimona is a shape-shifter, a monster, a misunderstood hellion with a heart of gold. Voiced by Chloë Grace Moretz, the title character busts into a futuristic world where knights defend the castle and the powerful might not be as benevolent as they’d like the citizens to believe. Based on a best-selling graphic novel by ND Stevenson and directed by Nick Bruno and Troy Quane (who also co-directed “Spies in Disguise”), this 2023 animated feature from Netflix gives young children a mile-a-minute main character who slides between “good guy” and “bad guy” status, defying the usual stereotypes. Stevenson has called the story a transgender allegory, and the L.G.B.T.Q. representation is a welcome change from the usual kids’ movie universes, where knights fall in love with princesses, not with each other. Here, Riz Ahmed voices Ballister Boldheart, a knight who has been wrongly accused of murdering Queen Valerin (Lorraine Toussaint). Ballister reluctantly allows Nimona to help him take down a corrupt system, prove his innocence and reunite with his partner, Ambrosius Goldenloin (Eugene Lee Yang). As a character, Nimona has zero chill and might prove a little tough for adults to watch for any length of time, but my son was entertained by the character’s constant motion, chaotic energy and what-will-come-next transformations.‘Miraculous: Ladybug & Cat Noir, The Movie’Watch it on Netflix.Many youngsters will already be familiar with the hit French series “Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir,” about two Parisian teen superheroes named Marinette (voiced by Cristina Vee for the English-speaking cast) and Adrien (Bryce Papenbrook), who secretly transform into Ladybug and Cat Noir to save their city from villains. They’re members of The Miraculous, a group of protectors who vanquish evil all over the world. This time, the superheroes get nearly two hours of screen time to join forces and stop the evil Hawk Moth (Keith Silverstein) from unleashing destruction throughout the City of Light. Directed by Jeremy Zag, who co-wrote the screenplay with Bettina López Mendoza and also wrote the songs, the 2023 movie amps up the action, with plenty of scenes in which Ladybug and Cat Noir fly over Parisian landmarks and battle the bad guys. There are musical numbers, moments of valor, and enough silly humor and flirty banter between the real-life teenagers and their alter egos to keep elementary-age kids watching. The vibrant reds and purples that make the series stand out visually are on full display, and the same girl power theme that defines the series carries over to the film.‘Heroes of the Golden Mask’Rent it on Amazon Prime and Vudu.In this Arcana Studios 2023 production directed by Sean Patrick O’Reilly, an orphan named Charlie (voiced by Kiefer O’Reilly) is trying his best to survive on the mean streets of his city. Just as Charlie is about to get nabbed by the cops for another petty crime, a door opens and a strange figure offers him a quick escape in the form of a magic portal. Charlie hops through, and he’s transported to an ancient Chinese kingdom called Sanxingdui. He meets an unlikely group of golden-masked superheroes who tell Charlie they need his help defeating a ruthless enemy set on conquering the kingdom. At first Charlie schemes to help the heroes with the secret intention of taking the golden masks, but lessons are learned and Charlie discovers that money and greed aren’t the most important things in life. The animation looks a little like a low-budget video game, and the writing and performances are definitely not awards-season worthy, but Patton Oswalt voices a blue ogre named Aesop, Ron Perlman voices Kunyi, and Christopher Plummer, before his death, voiced the character Rizzo. It’s a bit of a mishmash, but if your kid is craving swordplay, winged tigers and dragons that look like they mated with a moose, give this one a try.‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3’Watch it on Disney+.The final installment of the director James Gunn’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” trilogy, released in May, might not go down as the best of the three, but it should entertain older elementary school and middle school kids who’ve come to love Peter Quill/Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), Gamora (Zoe Saldaña), Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper) and Drax (Dave Bautista). When we meet back up with the Marvel gang, Star-Lord is grieving Gamora, who died in “Avengers: Infinity War.” Never fear, though! Gamora (sort of) returns to the crew in the form of a time-traveling variant, but this Gamora has no memory of her relationship with Peter. The story largely centers on Rocket, and the Guardians’ attempts to save his life and take down the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji), an evil scientist who created Rocket and who is now intent on mutiny. Cooper brings some genuine emotion to Rocket’s journey, and Iwuji portrays a formidable villain.‘DC League of Super-Pets’Watch it on Max.One could easily imagine this movie being pitched in a conference room: An animated superhero movie, but about their pets! The delightful simplicity of it would be tough to pass up. Here, we have Dwayne Johnson voicing Superman’s dog, Krypto, a pup whose favorite chew toy is a little squeaky Batman doll. Youngsters won’t care about the voices behind the adorable super-pets, but Kevin Hart, Keanu Reeves, Kate McKinnon, Natasha Lyonne and Marc Maron make a formidable cast. Krypto was sent to Earth as a puppy to look after Superman (voiced by John Krasinski), so the two have a sweet bond that might make both children and adults feel a little weepy because dogs are the best. Krypto can fight crime, but he’s a misfit when it comes to relating to non-superhero dogs. When Superman proposes marriage to Lois Lane (Olivia Wilde), he takes Krypto to a shelter to meet some other dogs, so he won’t feel like a third wheel, and just like that, a league of super-pets is formed. With a screenplay by the “Lego Batman Movie” writers Jared Stern and John Whittington, this 2022 charmer, directed by Stern and Sam Levine, has enough action, sweetness and humor to warrant multiple viewings. More

    • 113 Shares139 Views

      in Movies

      How ‘Nimona’ Helped Its Creator Explore His Emerging Identity

      by

      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

    • 63 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Nimona’ Review: Fright the Power

      by

      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