Nimona creator ND Stevenson describes the upcoming film adaptation as “a phoenix rising again from the ashes” ahead of its release on Netflix on June 30. The adaptation of his beloved graphic novel was in the works at Blue Sky before the animation studio was unceremoniously shuttered following Disney’s acquisit⛄ion of Fox. Despite everything, the plucky little shapeshifter persisted until the folks over at Annapurna believed this story of unabashed queerness deserved a seꦐcond chance. The voices behind it share equal amounts of relief, triumph, and optimism.
“I feel like it’s hitting me all at once,” Stevenson tells me after a week spent at Annecy Festival in France and a number of screenings in New York. “It’s kind of catching me off guard in a weird way because we spent so long not knowing if this movie was ever going to see the light of day. That even when it was done, when it was finished, when everything was falling into place, we were still waitin꧑g for that last little twist to say, ‘No! It’s over again’.”
Directors Nick Bruno & Troy Quane share similar levels of bewildered excitement, each expressing a disbelief that Nimona was able to be made at all, and now it’s only days away from release. “There was a period in time when the movie was fully dead,” Quane says. “It was not being made. It was in a vault, never t♋o see the light of day. It was crushing because so many people had put so much passion and love and sweat into it. We had just put up our story reels, and we knew we had a great movie and amazing character ready to introduce to the world.”
Bruno adds: “It’s been a tumꦆultuous journey, but at the end of the day none of it matters. We have a movie that’s going out into the world and it either resonates with people or it doesn’t. I’m incredibly excited that it’s going out into the world and I absolutely love it, and I hope the world loves it back.”
Blue Sky Studios closed in February 2021 after the release of its final feature film, S🔯pies in Disguise. Staff were laid off and projects like Nimona were cancelled despite a large amount of the film already being complete. Reports pointed to 75 percent of the film having crossed the finish line, a rumour which Quane is happy to shed some much-needed light on.
“The truth is that we were about 70 percent through layout. We had maybe five sequences into animation, and maybe two actually completed. But we had our story reels, we had all our models built, we had all the locations. All that kind of technical stuff, the front end, the design work, that was all done🉐. We knew🐬 the story we wanted to tell.”
Unfortunately, when the project was revived by Netflix and Annapurna, all of this progress had 🍸to be rebuilt with a new team, meaning a film’s foundations had to be reimagined while being influenced by all the work Blue Sky had made possible. Bruno and Quane say that the story of Nimona almost mirrors that of Blue Sky in how it talꦯks about the expression of identity and the need to persevere in unfair circumstances. At times, life can throw you a bone and something magical appears after refusing to give up.
“You have to bring it to a new group of people with new passions, new experiences, new backgrounds, and we had to sorta point to the things that we loved about what we did at Blue Sky,” Quane says. “But also to let them discover it in their own voice and their own passion and bring us new ideas that we had to make sure we were open to accepting and seeing and not just dismissing because it was a lit♈tle different from what we’d done. It was a good challenge, a great journey, and we couldn’t have done it without a fantastic crew.”
Blue Sky’s demise was unexpected to most of its employees, but like with any acquisition of this scale, there was an anxiety permeating across the Connecticut studio as Disney loomed over it. “Everyone was a little bit nervous because you understand what happens when a business takes over another business,” Bruno explains. “There was a part of us that always expected it, but at the same time you love wha𓃲t you do and love the people you work with. I mean, these are people I worked with for the better half of two decades, people who were at my wedding and there for the birth of my children. This is family, right?”
As one of the few major feature animation studios on the East Coast, Bruno stresses to me that “everyone who was there wanted to be there and wanted to be together.” Roughly 450 people were out of work in the midst of a pandemic when Blue Sky closed, although the directors are quick to stress that, sinꦬce then, many of them are striving on new films, games, and other projects with massive success. To return to Nim🅰ona is a fitting love letter to what was once thought lost.
“When they announced it, and as devastated as I was for the movie, I was more devastated on a personal level,” Bruno says. “This was my whole career. This was my family, friends. Believe it or not, we were planning to show the story reels on Thursday, and the studio was closed down that Tuesday. It ꦚwas that devastating. At that point we were dead. It was over, there’s no coming back, there’s no way out. So we decided we’re going to show the reels on that Thursday anyway, bring everyone together in a big Zoom call so we could all watch the movie.&rdqu𒈔o;
The pandemic meant that this imprompt🐻u Zoom call was a bittersweet farewell for Blue Sky, as Nimona was sealed away and news trickled out. “It was what everyone put their hearts into,” Bruno says, “It 🐽was the first time we got it right, and there were just tons of tears. I still remember listening to ‘Kim Petras - Heart To Break’ after the movie was over and nobody wanted to hit the end call button on that meeting. I’m incredibly grateful we’re still here. But we missed that family.”
Quane describes the experience of finishing Nimona and then sharing it with former Blue Sky employees has been incredibly cathartic, as so much of the personality, themes, and love has carried over to this new vision even if🌃 so much had to be remade. That spirit was always going to persist. “It’s a huge testament to whom these people are and what Blue Sky was because there’s so much positivity in the celebration they bring even if they couldn’t be the ones to finish it. There’s no grumbling or negativity, it’s all positive, uplifting optimism. I have to say there probably couldn’t be a more perfect legacy for Blue Sky. That heart and that celebration, even beyond their own experience, was just the kind of place it was.”
