‘Nimona’ Creator ND Stevenson Still Can’t Believe the Ex-Disney Movie Survived

Getting a movie made can be a nightmare. Just ask ND Stevenson, the creator of the beloved graphic novel Nimona, now an animated film on Netflix. “I can’t even imagine what it would be like if this movie went smoothly,” Stevenson said in an interview with The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, shortly before the film’s June 30 release.

In 2015, two years after the graphic novel hit shelves to wide acclaim, Fox Animation acquired the rights for Nimona; Fox-owned Blue Sky Studios (Ice Age) was set to produce a film adaptation. But in 2019, Disney took over Blue Sky when it acquired 21st Century Fox. In 2021, with the film 75-percent completed, Disney shut down Blue Sky, canceling Nimona in the process. Though Disney claimed this was because of ongoing issues with the pandemic, a number of Blue Sky employees claimed that Disney had issues with its queer themes, which are rarely seen in mainstream Western animation, including a same-sex kiss.

However, all hope was not lost—Netflix came to the rescue in 2022, officially reviving the project alongside Annapurna Pictures. Eight years after that first announcement, the Nimona movie is finally here. “The movie died and came back a couple times,” Stevenson said, a hopefulness in his voice. “If none of these outsized, dramatic events happened to it, I don’t know what this movie would be. I don’t think I’d recognize it.”

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That idea of rebirth also happens to be at the heart of Nimona’s story. Stevenson—who also created Netflix’s She-Ra and the Princesses of Power—crafted a defiantly, joyously queer world. While Nimona often takes the form of a human girl, as a shapeshifter, she’s able to turn herself into any creature she desires. Nimona doesn’t conform to any particular gender, something that queer fans have adored about the character since the comic debuted.

But the queerness in Nimona runs deeper than its spunky central character—it explores the idea of chosen family, same-sex romance, and how powerful institutions perceive queerness as “other,” and therefore a threat to normalcy. It’s also something that resonates on a personal level with Stevenson, who came out as queer and, later, trans in the decade since he first released Nimona.

With Nimona finally available for audiences to watch, we spoke to Stevenson over Zoom about the film’s complicated production process, how his own gender identity informed the story, and why he thinks Nimona’s themes feel so impactful now—perhaps even more so than they did than when it first launched as a webcomic in 2012.

After so much time in development, Nimona was shelved. How did the film come back to life?

The whole movie has been a truly wild ride. It’s been almost exactly eight years—I looked it up. June 2015 was when it was optioned [by Fox Animation] to become an animated motion picture. And then, in between then and now… I’ve never been able to predict what will happen next. When we found out that Blue Sky was getting shut down, it was devastating. And it wasn’t just because of the movie. It was also [about] all these amazing people who were out of a job. It was the only major animation studio on the East Coast—it was like this holdout when everything else was happening on the West Coast. It was just really sad to see that this movie would never see the light of day, when so many amazing people have worked so hard on it.

Blue Sky shut down on a Tuesday, and there was supposed to be a screening [of Nimona] on Thursday. We went ahead and did it virtually, and it became kind of this goodbye party. And I think the whole time, there was this energy there. There was a part of me that kind of knew that this wasn’t the end. I feel like when you have that momentum… it couldn’t be the end of the story there.

And it certainly wasn’t!

These awesome producers at Blue Sky just picked up their phones and started making calls. I think it was a month or two later [after the studio closed] that they struck the deal with Annapurna and that the movie was still truckin’. I felt like I knew the whole time that this wasn’t the end, but I still didn’t quite let myself believe that it was really happening.

So being here now with the whole crew in New York, we’re riding so high on this, and we’re all still having to pinch ourselves a little bit, being like, “This is real. This is happening. This movie is going to be out there!” It’s a really good feeling.

What was it like having your work adapted to a feature film?

When I set out to make Nimona as a comic [in 2012], I had no idea what I was doing. I was still just figuring out how to make comics. One of my favorite things about the book is you can see me learning how to draw as it goes on. The comic is so scrappy, and it’s so free-form. All of the choices that I’m making in it are very intuitive. To not only start to realize that this story had broader appeal than I had expected, but also that it had this life outside of me, even when it was published as a graphic novel… I was realizing that it wasn’t just this quirky little passion project that I had going on—people were seeing themselves in it.

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And even more people saw themselves in it when it transitioned from webcomic to graphic novel.

When it ended up hitting the shelves of major bookstores and getting nominated for a National Book Award [in 2015], [I had] this realization that this was bigger than I’d expected it to be, that it was kind of taking on a life of its own. That didn’t mean that it was easy to hand over the keys—to have it be made into a movie. The characters were very personal. I felt very protective of them. But, like everything else along this journey, it was this practice in letting go, kind of opening my hands and letting it be what it was going to be.

We all know the stories of creators who’ve had their work adapted. There’s really anything that can happen, there’s no guarantee that you’re going to like what’s made, and there’s no guarantee it’s gonna match your vision. I had to just hope for the best.

How involved were you during production?

I had various levels of involvement with the movie at different times. Sometimes I was pretty hands-off. Sometimes I was pretty involved in the daily cycle of things. But I think overall, I was pretty open to having changes made. I told the story I set out to tell—the movie is going to be its own thing. But I still have insights into the characters and into the world and why certain choices are being made so that even if the choice was different in the movie, at least it would come from that same kernel of truth.

The film departs from the graphic novel in some pretty significant ways—Ballister is a very different character, the retro-futurist world feels a lot more developed, and Nimona herself gets more of a backstory. Were there elements that you were especially protective and wanted to maintain in the film? Were there elements that you were especially protective of and wanted to keep in the film?

I think for me, the biggest thing that I wanted to stay true to was Nimona [played by Chloë Grace Moretz in the movie] herself. It was always trying to bring it back to her. Ballister [voiced by Riz Ahmed] is the character that a lot of people relate to. He’s a little bit of a straight man—not actually a straight man, but you get it. Nimona is a character who’s mysterious and intense. She’s the character that makes the story what it is, and I just really wanted to make sure that her character was being honored. So while all of these other things are changing, it was always re-centering on, “Where is Nimona? What is she feeling? Where did she come from?” Because she really is this spark that makes the story what it is.

I think as soon as she fell into place, everything else could build on her, and she could be the catalyst that creates this explosion that is this movie.

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One thing that’s really interesting about Nimona is how beloved it is by the queer community, and especially trans folks. Yet its queerness is more subtle and less overt than something like She-Ra. Were you conscious of Nimona’s queerness when you were writing it?

I think that I was conscious of it in some ways, but I certainly was nowhere near close to figuring myself out. It would be years until I came out as gay, and then years beyond that to come out as trans.

But looking back, it is so obviously there! It is all over the place in the story. I was very drawn toward gay characters and gay relationships [at the time]. I think I knew that there was a part of me that I hadn’t yet tapped into—that making comics was my way of sort of living vicariously through these characters. The trans stuff, I don’t think that I understood that yet. … Looking back and reading it and seeing it all over the place…I’m like, “Oh, my God.” I just wanna grab my tiny baby head and shake it a little bit. But also, I had to go on the journey that I did. And the comic was part of that.

In the 11 years since you first published Nimona, have you seen the impact of it change for readers? Do you think the story affects them differently now, as it does you?

What’s cool about a process like this is [learning] that there are things that have stayed relevant, and there’s things that were even more timely than expected. … But I don’t think that any of us expected some of the themes of the movie, even when they were intended, to be as timely as they are. Especially the rapid reactionary backlash to the visibility of trans people in the U.S.—none of us predicted that in the exact form that it ended up taking.

This movie is all about empathy and love and understanding, while also not needing to understand every single thing about someone in order to love them. I hope that that’s the message that the movie puts out there—that people can be OK with maybe not understanding every single reason why a trans person is presenting the way they do or living their lives the way they do. You don’t need to understand that to love them.But also, [it’s about how] the more you get to know someone, the more you will understand them.

That theme resonated with me, as I watched. There’s this really beautiful line from Nimona, about just wanting to be seen that I think speaks to the very core of the movie.

I love that line.

The performances in the film especially help make that message clear. Were you involved in casting, and how did it feel to kind of hear the voices for the first time?

When it came to casting, I was like, “I’m a little too close to this one. Y’all have to take it away.” So [later], hearing a voice like Riz [Ahmed] as Ballister was like, ‘Oh my God, of course!’ His voice is in the comic in my brain now.

Hearing a voice given to my inner voice [a.k.a. Nimona] is so cool and so wild. [Moretz] makes all these choices that are so unexpected—she's Nimona! She has that unpredictable aspect, and unpredictable to me as well! Just hearing her explode into this character and bring this life to her, it's so absolutely [Nimona].

One of the really cool things about it being Chloë is that I was coming of age around the era of Kick-Ass back in 2010, and there’s no way that [Moretz’s character] Hit Girl did not in some way inform Nimona. Looking back, it feels meant to be.

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I agree—Moretz inhabits the role beautifully. What do you think the impact of Nimona has going forward, now that it’s coming to a new audience in a different era?

I think that Nimona is going to remain relevant, but it is especially relevant right now. The theme of this story is that when we point at someone and say, “This is the bad guy! Everyone, look over there,” that is very often not true. We focus on the bad guys, the villains, the monsters, because usually there is something that is way more complicated and a little bit more uncomfortable [to face instead].

Evil doesn’t always look like evil. It looks like something that is shiny and expected and safe and normal. There’s something easy about looking at something lurking in the shadows and assuming it's evil. That’s something that's very human in a lot of ways: to focus on the thing that's gonna be easier for us to be afraid of—or hate.

But this story asks you to question why it is so easy to point at the most visible thing and be like, “That is the bad thing.” It is about looking beneath the surface and asking what [do we think] looks like good and evil to us. That’s what we're seeing so much right now, especially at these times of mass moral panics. You see the characters in the movie go through that evolution as well and start to question why they’ve been doing things this way for their entire lives—why they’ve never questioned it before. I think that is something that’s really important for us to question too.

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