A disgraced knight, unjustly blamed for a murder, joins forces with an outcast teenage girl. He hopes to clear his name. She just wants to cause some chaos. And she’s well equipped to do so: Nimona (voiced by Chloë Grace Moretz) is a shape-shifter. She can effortlessly morph from rhino to eagle, whale to mouse. She is sparky fun: an irreverent antihero with a talent for destruction. Unfortunately, she’s also the very monster that the knight, Ballister Boldheart (Riz Ahmed), has been trained to kill.
A medieval-futurist fantasy world, in which gleaming tower blocks are topped with a castle’s crenellations; in which knights in armour defend the realm with hi-tech swords that double as laser guns: the backdrop to the Netflix animation Nimona, adapted from a graphic novel by ND Stevenson, is as striking and distinctive as the film’s animation style. Nodding to the graphic simplicity of mid-century illustrators like Eyvind Earle, the film subverts the expected use of colour: Ballister and Nimona’s lair is drenched in the traditionally villainous hues of red and black. And let’s just say that those wearing white are not necessarily the heroes.
