Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Nimona
2023 · Troy Quane · Nimona on Sightlines
The pink comes first. Before Nimona is a girl, or a beast, or whatever she's about to be, she is a smear of hot pink thrown across the frame, and something else walks out of it. Most computer animation would dissolve one body into another and let the software find all the shapes in between. This film won't give you the in-between. It gives you a colour, and the colour does the work.
Hold on that smear, because it tells you what kind of movie you're in.
The plot underneath is an old machine, and it runs beautifully. A knight is framed for a terrible crime. He has to prove he didn't do it. Gilles Deleuze called that engine the movement-image: a character perceives a situation, acts to change it, the action resolves the situation. Perception in, action out, every cut serving the chain. Most action cinema ever made is this machine, and directors Troy Quane and Nick Bruno know it cold. Their previous Blue Sky feature, Spies in Disguise, ran an entire comedy on it — a superspy involuntarily turned into a pigeon, saddled with a mismatched partner, spending the film trying to get his body back. Transformation was the problem. The joke was that a man had ended up in the wrong shape.
Nimona reverses the polarity. The wrong shape is the person.
Deleuze has a figure for someone like her, and it isn't "liar." He calls it the forger (le faussaire), drawn largely from Orson Welles: a protagonist whose identity arrives as a series rather than a fact. The forger isn't hiding a true self behind masks. For the forger, "true self" was never the right unit of measure. You can't judge what she does by whether it matches an original; you can only ask what it makes possible next. Deleuze files this whole territory under the powers of the false, where power means capacity — what a falsehood can do, not what it fails to be.
Nimona is the most legible forger commercial animation has produced. She shifts to escape, and to fight, sure. But the film's heart isn't in the utility. It's in her flat refusal to hold one form even when holding one would be easier, and in what happens to the question what are you really, underneath? when she's standing right there. The question curdles into a demand: pick an original. She won't. She'd rather be the villain, thank you.
That last part is the sharpest move in the film, and Deleuze has a name for it too: fabulation, a subject caught in the act of legending themselves. The kingdom has a story about monsters. Nimona doesn't refute the story. She picks it up and performs it back, louder, with better timing. This is where she parts company with her own ancestors. The Iron Giant earned its sympathy by animating a feared weapon into gentleness while a paranoid state mobilized to exterminate it. ParaNorman built the template — the misunderstood outsider hounded by a mob and an institution — and slipped mainstream animation its first openly gay character while it was at it. Both films plead: he isn't what you think. Nimona inherits their staging, the persecuting institution and the creature the crowd has already convicted, and declines the plea. She's fine being the monster. The question is whether anything else was ever on offer.
Which is why the political concept that fits is Deleuze's hardest one: the people are missing. Watching filmmakers in minor and colonized cinemas, he noticed they couldn't address "the people" the way a Soviet montage film could, because the people they'd need didn't exist yet, so the film had to invent them. That's the actual engine of the queer allegory here, and why it stays legible to any kid who's been called a monster without ever being explained to them. This techno-medieval kingdom of holograms and heraldry has a slot marked knight and a slot marked villain and no slot for her. Its institutions destroy what they can't categorize. Nimona has no constituency, so she makes one out of a legend and a teenager's attitude.
There's a media argument buried in the frame-up. The kingdom is rendered like a screen-saturated police state: holograms everywhere, heraldry everywhere, which is to say the image is how power speaks here. André Bazin's case for film realism rested on the photograph being a mold taken off the world — the camera was there, therefore trust it. Cinema inherited that contract and has been renegotiating it ever since. Animation never signed it. Every frame is fabricated, so this film can treat falsity as generative rather than criminal: a kingdom where the frame-up is native to the medium of authority, and the shapeshifter, who lies with her entire body, is the one telling the truth.
Now look at how it's drawn, because the technique argues the same thing. Deleuze opens Cinema 1 with Bergson: film's radical trick was sampling motion at any-instant-whatever, equidistant mechanical slices with no instant more important than its neighbours, where the older arts chose a pose — the privileged instant, the moment worth sculpting. CG pushed any-instant-whatever to its limit. Perfectly smooth, infinitely interpolatable, never obliged to choose. Then Into the Spider-Verse broke it by hand: comic linework, halftone dithering, animation stepped on twos so a drawing holds for a beat before the next one arrives. It gave the privileged instant back to mainstream animation. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish ran the same play in the same window, painterly and stepped. Nimona takes that licence and spends it on exactly the right subject. A body that won't stay still, animated so every form it lands in is held long enough to read as a chosen picture rather than a slur of interpolation. ND Stevenson's flat-colour panels survive the trip into three dimensions intact. And the overlay-and-jump-cut grammar it shares with The Mitchells vs. the Machines keeps the space slightly incoherent on purpose — feeling first, geography later, what critics now call post-continuity.
So what did it move? It took the sympathy-for-the-monster film, which had been running on pleading for sixty years, and swapped the plea for a refusal. That's a real change to the shape of the story: the third act can no longer be the moment the crowd finally understands. It has to be something harder.
The production story rhymes, and the film never asked for the rhyme. Blue Sky was shuttered with this nearly finished. Annapurna and Netflix pulled it out of the rubble. It came back with an Oscar nomination. A fable about institutions that destroy what they can't categorize, very nearly destroyed by one.
Watch it again for the smear. Then watch which forms she's allowed to hold, and for how long, and who's in the room when she holds them.
Concepts in play
- The forger (le faussaire) — Nimona's identity arrives as a series of forms rather than a fact: 'a shapeshifting teenager who'd rather be the villain, thank you, and whose refusal to hold one form is the film's whole beating heart.'
- The powers of the false — A knight framed for a crime inside a kingdom 'rendered like a screen-saturated police state' of holograms and heraldry — where the image is the medium of authority and therefore of the frame-up — while the character who 'lies' with her whole body is the truthful one.
- Fabulation (legending) — Rather than refuting the kingdom's monster story, Nimona takes it up and performs it back: she'd rather be the villain — the opposite of the plea for understanding staged by ParaNorman and The Iron Giant.
- The people are missing — 'A fable about institutions that destroy what they can't categorize,' with a queer allegory 'legible to any kid who's been called a monster' — a kingdom whose only roles are knight and villain, leaving its central figure with no constituency to appeal to.
- Privileged instants — The post-Spider-Verse pipeline the film inherits — comic linework, halftone dithering, mixed on-ones/on-twos frame rates, shared with Puss in Boots: The Last Wish — holds each pose instead of interpolating smoothly, so every shape Nimona lands in registers as a chosen picture.
- Affective colour (the colour-image) — The 'pink smears of transformation': transformation is delivered as a colour event that absorbs the frame rather than as a morph between bodies.
- Post-continuity — The 'kinetic punk' overlay-and-jump-cut editing grammar shared with The Mitchells vs. the Machines — doodle and text layered over CG at meme-speed cutting rhythm, prioritising immediate affect over coherent screen geography.
- The movement-image — The chassis of the plot: a disgraced knight perceives his framing and acts to prove his innocence — the same reluctant-duo, body-transformation action grammar Quane and Bruno built Spies in Disguise on, here inverted so that transformation is identity rather than the problem to be solved.