Nimona’s voice is ND Stevenson’s voice. It’s an interpretation I hear from both directors Nick Bruno and Troy Quane alongside the cartoonist himself, who is hot off the heels of a fanciful premiere and multiple nationwide screenings before the film’s release on Netflix this week.
When the queer shapeshifter was first envisioned over a decade ago while Stevenson was still in college, he was unconsciously suppressing an identity that years later would spill out into both his work and the life he ended up leading. Now it all comes full circle, so I sat down with Stevenson to talk about the film’s themes, characters, and how it feels to be so unafraid of thriving on one’s own intimate queernes🅺s.
“The spirit of Nimona started out as this character who was just me,” Stevenson says. “She was really personal, so to s🌼ee her grow and take on a life of her own was [amazing]. It felt like when production was at its hardest, when the movie was over, when it was dead and there was no hope, that spirit and the way everyone connected to the character personally carried us through. Even when it seemed it was absolutely over and there was no chance, it still seemed like nobody 🎃wanted to stop fighting. And they didn’t.”
Nimona’s production was tumultuous. The film rights were first scooped up in 2015, and it entered production at Blue Sky Studios several years later. With a queer lead and several LGBTQ+ themes, many were hopeful that the ada💎ptation would not only break new ground in the feature animation space, but would challenge many of the limitations companies like Disney sought to put in place. Unfortunately, when Disney acquired Fox, Blue Sky was one of the first casualties. Nimona was vaulted away until Annapurna and Netflix came along to bring it back to life, but even then, all work on it had to be completely redone.
“This has been such a special process for us,” Stevenson adds. “The process of making this movie does mirror a lot of the plot. This story of💯 this phoenix rising again from the ashes, and it just feels like this character is out there in the world now and about to be seen by so many pe🤡ople. So I’m just enjoying this moment and really, really excited for the next step.”
As a follower of Stevenson’s previous work such as She-Ra, Lumberjanes, and their mix of personal comics on Substack, a large portion of our chat is spent talking about the nature of queer identity and how, through much of his work, this is expressed without compromise. “I look back, and I see feelings that I wasn’t ready to express yet that I was feeling out through the comic,” Stevenson explains. “I was so not ready to feel that, and I didn’t know that was the story I was telling. In so many ways, all of these feelings from over ten years ago are coming back through this mo✃vie and knocking me on my ass in the best way.
“It feels so vulnerable to see that part of myself up on screen, and then to see that reaction to that character and the way people are finding their own stories within it. It’s really healing, like I’m se𒅌nding back this little beacon of hope to who I was first coming up with Nimona.”
Nimona is all about a shapeshifting girl who feels like she doesn’t belong, who for her entire life has been told she doesn’t fit in and must be subject to prejudice from a society refusing to move forward. She&rsquo🍷;s outcast by those who won’t accept certain ways of life. It’s a story of othering, identity, and perseverance in the face of adversity. And like a lot of memorable queer stories, it takes on a deeper𓆏 meaning than those behind it ever perhaps intended. For Stevenson, Nimona is much the same.
“Something about it seems so much bigger than me,” he admits. “I know that the comic was coming from the pain and the fear and the anger that I had in my heart at that time, but all of those seeds seem to have grown in that time and through thi♔s movie. It feels like I’m being taken along for the ride of this movie and maybe set a spark all these years ago that I didn’t know I was setting, and now it’s something that has grown and grown and continues to grow.”
Ironically, while much of Stevenson’s work♉ centres around specific aspects of queerness, so much of it was released or embraced by fans before he himself came out. “Nimona and then Lumberjanes both were done before I came out as gay, and then Double Trouble in She-Ra was before I came out as trans. These characters gave me a way to feel that out through the safety of fiction, without having to do something that I wasn’t sure of. In my mind I can set up really intense walls that I don’t have the ability to look beyond, and fiction gives me a way of exploring that. Nimona saw me feeling out this queerness that has always been part of me.”
Stevenson takes me on a whistle stop tour of their transition and how, in retrospect, much of this has been expressed in their work through characters, themes, and narrative that feels almost surreal to look back on. “At first, it was [about] what being gender non-conforming meant for me, when I just didn’t see myself in a lot of female characters at that time. That’s where Nimona came from, and she frequently takes on ꦺmale personas throughout the comic, which felt really important to me. But then I really related to Ballister and Goldenloin as well. When I look back it feels like those emotions are woven throughout the story in ways I didn’t realise at the t🎃ime.”
Nimona is also a story of acceptance, and the hardship queer individuals go through when a family, friend, or wider society decides to not only refuse to accept them, but makes their lives worse purely because they can. Stevenson felt this in their own upbringing, and how seeing Nimona with people who he once feared would never accep🦹t him allowed tough yet needed conversations to finally take place.
“I’ve seen the film countless times, but my parents were at a recent screening and I didn’t realise how emotional that experience would be,” Stevenson tells me. “I grew up in a very conservative, evangelical environment, so my parents have come so far and have been on such a journey of their own. I feel so lucky that they accept me as I am, but they also don’t understand. They won't get it right a lot of time, and that’s something I do understand, but it’s a conversation we just kept not having, and maybe we’ll never have it. But after watching the movie, we had a conversation about [being trans] that we’ve never had before, and I still don’t know if they fully understand, it gave us a language to discuss what was going on.”
This push and pull of acceptance is a core theme throughout Nimona, and despite following a shapeshifting girl and a disgraced knight, it can be transplanted into the lives of any queer person. “It’s a difficult conversation to have without making you defensive. Ballister is not a bad person, you can see how much he cares, you can see how💃 good a person he is. But he doesn’t understand. You can see this growth throughout the movie. It gave us a way to talk about this, where I truly found that I think this movie is not only going to change lives, but 𝓡potentially save them. If families are watching this together and can understand that they might not be able to understand everything their kid is doing, but that doesn’t mean you can’t give them that unconditional love and support.”
Stevenson describes Nimona as a character who can’t be understood. She exists as some form of personified rebellion designed to question the prejudices of those who dare label her as not being feminine enough or expressing nebulous chaos in ways that inconvenience the status quo. “It’s the pressure to fit in or take on a form that people understand the easie♔st and will let you move through the world more easily,” he says. “But that’s not actually easier if you are the🌺 kind of person who needs to express yourself in this way. I think for the first time, I was able to talk about that.”
Ultimately though, through all its trials🎀 and tribulations, Ni🙈mona is a story about hope. About the love we are all deserving of in spite of who we are, where we come from, or whatever we might look like. It seeks to break down those barriers and question our internal prejudices whether we realise we hold them within us or not. Through media like this, there’s a chance similar conversation will blossom and enable progress in the real world.
&lꦆdquo;It changes the way you see the world, and you see yourself, even if you don&ꦬrsquo;t realise that’s what’s going on,” Stevenson says. “This is a living conversation, it’s not something where we grow up, now we’re all accepted, and it’s great. There’s always going to be another step, and I think all you can really do is ask those questions and try to push it to the next step, to turn a light on in the next room, so you can move through the darkness. Even if it’s only one room at a time, and you don’t know what that next step is.”
Nimona is coming to Netflix on June 30.
