Spoiler-filled commentary I wrote about the film Nimona on Discord primarily from 2024-06-14 to 2024-06-25. Since these were originally stream-of-consciousness observations that, due to my extreme ADHD, occurred in a highly nonlinear order, I’ve rearranged them to put related observations closer together. I’ve also added capitalization and lightly edited them in a few other ways, but I’ve left my meaning substantively unchanged.
The gap beneath this paragraph appears to prevent people that don’t want spoilers from accidentally spoiling themselves, because the next paragraph’s first sentence spoils the biggest twist in the entire film. Turn back now or forever hold your peace. You have been warned; this is your last chance.
I’ve been thinking a bit about why I immediately read the movie as implying a romantic subtext between Nimona and Gloreth. I think a big part of it was the physical contact, but there’s also the fact that they serve as a foil to Ballister and Ambrosius. In particular, the latter two demonstrate the value of listening and ultimately extending trust, forgiveness, and understanding to one’s romantic partner, where the former two demonstrate the horrible things that can happen when one doesn’t do that.
In the end, the one thing that I think really doesn’t work for me about the picture is that Gloreth is too young. Not only is she too young for romance, but she’s also young enough that we can expect her to simply absorb her parents’ statements uncritically. I’m not saying I forgive her for this, because I don’t. But it’s expected behavior for an eight-year-old (or whatever she was; I don’t think the movie actually says). Now, suppose she’d been sixteen instead. Not only would a romantic relationship at that age actually be plausible, but that’s also the age of teenage rebellion, which would cause Gloreth’s betrayal to sting even more.
Now, to be fair, I think the filmmakers were going for “Nimona’s entire society following rules set down by a literal child is incomprehensibly foolish,” but I don’t think you lose that by making her an adolescent rather than a preteen. Plus, of course, the problem is less her age than her uncritical absorption of her parents’ bigotry.
(Of course, making her sixteen would also have made from whence a far less understandable error.⁽¹⁾ Mind you, I’m saying this as someone who wrote a lot of Early Modern English in Eternal’s final chapter and reached a conclusion I suspect the filmmakers shared: modern audiences don’t know whence means from where, just as they don’t know wherefore means why. I just decided to use whence, whither, thence, and thither anyway, as I didn’t really care if my meaning was slightly misunderstood. But I was also making a mod for a 30-year-old Mac game noted for its erudition, not a film whose target audience included many children.)
That said, the movie clearly presents Ballister/Ambrosius and Nimona/Gloreth as foils, whether we read them as romantic or not. But while I would age Gloreth up, I think whether she and Nimona had a romantic relationship is more powerful if left as subtext: it’s one of those questions that doesn’t need to be resolved, and in such cases, I think it’s best to allow audiences to draw their own conclusions.
Indeed, one thing I found especially powerful about Nimona was that it knew which questions it didn’t need to answer. “What is Nimona?” ultimately isn’t important, and leaving the answer up to interpretation was the right choice. Leaving the only element of her background before she met Gloreth as “she was unable to find friends among animals” makes her story more powerful than it would be if we had any further answers. Are there more like her? It’s unclear, and I think the story is actually more powerful for that. Sometimes details can make a story more powerful, but sometimes their omission can make a story more universal. Knowing which is which is an important element of storytelling.
This is one of several reasons Nimona reminded me of Moonlight, which, as I’m sure I’ve said ad nauseam, is my favorite film of all time. Both films shrewdly use details in ways that make their stories more universal, not less. Their narratives about alienation from society are another huge factor. Plus, of course, there’s both films’ queer themes, but it’s not just their presence, but also how neither really treats them as a Big Deal beyond their direct relevance to the characters’ lives, thus preventing either from feeling self-congratulatory. Queerness is just a natural part of life in both films, and neither draws undue attention to it.
Of course, one important distinction between the two films’ handling of queerness is that Moonlight directly addresses characters being bullied for being queer, while Nimona at no point implies that that kind of thing even happens in the society it depicts. I think there are things to be said for each approach, and I think each film actually took the best approach possible for the audience it was trying to reach. (Also, Nimona being a fantasy and Moonlight being… not that no doubt ties into the appropriateness of each film’s approach.)
In any case, Nimona’s same-sex relationships are not the sort that will make children uncomfortable. A lot of kids probably won’t even notice they’re romantic relationships, in fact; the film doesn’t draw any sort of attention to its characters’ sexuality at all. Its relationships are the sort that make adults with certain worldviews uncomfortable. Draw from that, and Disney’s response to it, what you will.
| # | Note |
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| 1. | To be fair, this construction, redundant as it is, appears in Wyclif’s Bible, the works of Shakespeare, and the King James Bible, so it probably wasn’t always considered an error. |