Nimona’s creator wouldn’t let Netflix change his hero

What the animated movie NimonaFans of the original Webcomic will be excited to see it on Netflix June 30. NimonaYou will notice that the story is vastly different in both the original graphic novel and its collection. Even though some gags have been preserved, the humor style has changed dramatically. The movie’s retro-futurist world — a blend of sci-fi technology and medieval culture — is somewhat like the book’s, but it has much more structure and history, with more emphasis on the ruling class. Ballister Boldheart is the name of the second protagonist in this movie. His story is vastly different.

Press day in the lead up to Nimona’s release, writer-artist ND Stevenson explained that all those changes felt necessary, but that none of them mattered as much as preserving the title character as she was originally written.

“In the adaptation, I knew that things were going to change,” Stevenson said in a presentation livestreamed for select press outlets. “But it was always really important to me that Nimona herself remain the center of this story, and that the things that made her were not removed or sanded down or simplified too much.”

Nimona, a mysterious shape-changer who arrives at Ballister’s secret fortress and demands to be his sidekick after he’s framed as a villain, is the heart of both the book and the movie versions of the story. While she gets a much clearer backstory in the movie, she’s still the most recognizable character from the book, both in terms of her looks and her personality.

Image: Netflix

“One thing that I think is really important about this story for me — and it was really important to see in the movie — was the darkness at the heart of it,” Stevenson said. “Nimona is not just quirky, she’s not just fun, she’s not just a cool kick-butt protagonist. Her anger is a result of her fear, pain and frustration. That was something that I found very cathartic at the time.”

Stevenson is a trans man who came out in the early 1990s. Nimona in 2012 as an art school project, has only recently realized how much Nimona’s powers to change her own shape were an unconscious trans fantasy. Substack is his Substack. I’m Fine I’m Fine Just UnderstandStevenson has recently published a self-deprecating and funny cartoon blog. He talked about how, looking back on the comic, he didn’t realize what it was that he had written about at the time. In his memoir, Stevenson will reveal all in 2020 The fire never goes outThe original comics were a result of his struggle with depression and self expression. Nimona.

“I was looking for an outlet for my emotions, and I felt like I wasn’t really able to express them,” Stevenson said at the press day. “But through her, I could do that. At the end, she becomes this monster — the monster everybody’s been telling her that she is. And she’s just like, What do you say, want to be a monster. Here’s one. You got one.This was something that I had to see. And it was kind of a hard sell for a female character, then and now.”

While the movie’s expression of that idea is radically different from the book’s, it comes from the same place emotionally. “They absolutely stay true to that and brought that to life,” Stevenson said. “They even took that further, to show she’s not a problem to be solved. She’s not someone who needs to be fixed. You don’t have to understand her to love her. And I think that’s going to mean so much to so many people. The book was dedicated to Monster Girls. And I think there are so many monster girls and boys and beyond who are going to see themselves in her.”

Image: ND Stevenson via Substack

Stevenson’s insistence that Nimona remain recognizable in the movie extended to aspects of her character design, color scheme, and movement. “One of the things that was really important to me was her body type,” he said. “She’s chubby and she’s curvy, but she’s never sexualized, and she’s gender-nonconforming. She has her unique style. She has chosen to dress this way. And so that was something I just really wanted to make sure — no matter how much [the story] might change in the adaption, that that was something that stayed true.”

“It was very emotional to me to be able to see her come to life, and to see her this way and be like, That’s her. That’s Nimona. That’s this character who got me through so many hard times as a young person,” Stevenson said. “It was such a power fantasy for me. And I think for lots of kids, they’ll feel the same way. She can’t be confined. She can’t be constrained to any form. […] So I’m really, really excited for kids to be able to see themselves in that power fantasy.”

NimonaNetflix will release the film on 30 June.