Nimona Creator ND Stevenson on Netflix Film’s Journey, Inclusive Themes – The Hollywood Reporter

When ND Stevenson, co-producer of Nimona, discusses the fiery titular character of Netflix’s upcoming animated film, he uses descriptors rare for a lead: angry, punky, chubby, weird, off-putting. “She’s this teen girl who wants to murder people,” he says of the charmingly chaotic shape-shifter, aspiring villain and self-dubbed sidekick.

She also happens to be his avatar and alter-ego. Releasing June 30 on Netflix, Nimona is an animated feature based on Stevenson’s popular webcomic-turned-graphic novel, which garnered an Eisner Award and a National Book Award nomination. Onscreen, the story follows a feared shape-shifter (voiced by Chloë Grace Moretz) after she comes to the aid of Lord Ballister Boldheart (Riz Ahmed), a knight accused of a crime. 

For Stevenson, Nimona is a “power fantasy,” but one who is equally wounded and scared, desperate to be seen, held and loved. “She is a character with a lot of pain and anger at her heart, and that’s why she exists,” he says. “When I made her, I was doing it for my own catharsis.”

That personal journey started in 2012 when Stevenson began self-publishing Nimona online. Enrolled at the Maryland Institute College of Art, he was studying illustration amid the popularity of Cartoon Network series Adventure Time and Steven Universe. The two shows, which have been credited with spurring a generation of animated series at the network, were upending traditional TV animation with their age- and LGBTQ-inclusive narratives, and then-unconventional hiring of webcomics artists. 

While still an undergraduate, Stevenson says his early goal was to go from webcomics to working on Adventure Time, and so he began releasing Nimona’s pages on Tumblr. “At the time, I had just left the church, and so leaving the church for me was not just leaving Christianity as a faith, although I did that as well,” Stevenson tells The Hollywood Reporter. “It was also leaving behind the evangelical conservative upbringing that I had been raised with.

“Being out in the world as a young adult, I was very quickly questioning everything I have been taught my entire life,” he continues. “That’s a very disorienting thing to do, to try to figure out what you believe, just based on your perception of the world and what’s going on.”

It’s a theme that runs throughout the comic and onscreen, where Nimona calls upon audiences to consider it again and again within the towering walls of a medieval-like future society — a scientifically and technologically “utopian” city that is equally militarized and surveilled. But it also winds through characters like Ballister, an outcasted gay knight who is navigating a system that once raised and championed him, before a single event sees them swiftly mark him as an enemy.

That includes fellow knight, and Ballister’s former boyfriend, Lord Ambrosius Goldenloin (Eugene Lee Yang), a character who was adapted as East Asian for the film, but who Stevenson says was intentionally written in his comic as the embodiment of white privilege. 

“It’s convenient to cast him in the role of the hero because he’s a white man with blond hair and classic good looks, and ‘You have everything we need for us to make this pitch — to sell this propaganda — of who the good guy is and who the bad guy is,’” Stevenson explains. “He’s a deeply flawed person who is clinging to his version of the world that he wants to be true, shutting everything out to the point of behaving villainously, whether he thinks that or not.”

Following a popular two-year run online, the Nimona webcomic would be published as a graphic novel in 2015, and much like its leading teenage shape-shifter, the book defied convention. 

“When I was first making it as a webcomic, I didn’t have any age demographic in mind. I certainly wasn’t really thinking of it as a young adult comic because at the time that had a very specific context. The YA shelf was all paranormal teenage romance,” the creative recalls. “Of course, those labels have the meaning that we give them, so that’s what ended up happening. It ended up on that YA shelf, and it found an audience there who was maybe looking for something different.”

The story explores the kind of themes Stevenson, who served as the showrunner for the subversive animated reboot She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, has always been interested in: good versus evil, hero versus villain, light versus dark, and “the ways that that is not always what it seems to be.”

“It’s about who we really are versus who we think we are, who we are trying to be, and who we say we are,” the transmasculine and bi-gender creative says.

In the decade since Nimona published online, the story has proven to be more relatable than even he anticipated. “Early on, I was getting so much of, ‘How do we relate to her if we’re not teen girls?’” he recalls of the beginning days of the film’s production, a time when Stevenson felt Nimona could be losing her leading status. “I think this, ‘The character is not relatable enough’ — this not white enough, not male enough, not hero’s-journey enough thing of, if it’s not that, people will get scared or not like it — is not true. All stories are universal, even if they represent something very specific, niche or personal.”

It was a story that almost didn’t make it to the screen. The film adaptation was shuttered in April 2021 following the closure of Blue Sky Studios as part of the Disney-Fox merger. It initially “felt like this tragic end of this journey,” Stevenson says. But members of Nimona’s original creative team refused to give up. They would launch their own studio — Shapeshifter Films — to finish the animated feature before Annapurna Pictures announced in April 2022 that the movie, which is co-directed by Nick Bruno and Troy Quane and written by Robert L. Baird and Lloyd Taylor, would release on Netflix. 

“It was a weird time. It was an uncertain time, but it felt like Nimona as a character. There was that refusal to stay down, that sort of fuck-the-man, chaos energy, a spark that they refused to let go out,” Stevenson says. “Her fighting spirit was what carried that movie through. Everyone believed in her so much. No one was ready to stop. It feels like it reflects the plot of the comic — that it couldn’t kill her. It feels so punk rock. Most stories don’t end in that way, you know? But this one did.”

Now set to debut on the streamer June 30, the film will make history for its LGBTQ inclusion. Beyond having Yang, RuPaul, Indya Moore and Julio Torres among its voice cast, the story features a main character whose shape-shifting abilities — both visually and within the film’s dialogue — code her gender as fluid and trans.

The movie’s other hero, Ballister (whose last name went from Blackheart to Boldheart for the film), is a South Asian gay man and amputee who finds himself on the wrong end of a sword while trying to make an elite, historically exclusionary institution more representative. Holding that sword is his former partner, Ambrosius, who grapples with his own “heroic” identity within an institution he’s been unflinchingly faithful to — until it asks him to follow an order he’s not sure that he can carry out.

Like the comic, the film centers on an inclusive cast of characters, but similar to Stevenson’s own belief about the nature of storytelling, Nimona’s themes remain universal while never feeling heavy-handed. “We’re very different, but at the same time we’re the same, and we’re not alone,” Bruno said while speaking to one of Netflix film’s biggest messages during a press day. “That’s a message that not just Ballister says to Nimona, but we’re trying to say to the audience as well. Anybody who’s ever felt like an outsider, you’re not alone.”

Yet, as the film’s release approaches — more than a decade since the Nimona webcomic was published online — the story’s timeliness and relatability has surprised even Stevenson as a creative who loves boundary-pushing narratives. He points to a growing reactionary panic around American racial and LGBTQ communities as the same “sowing of fear, specifically by a small group of people,” that’s present within his story’s true villains.

“I don’t think that any of us expected the state of the world and current events to unfold exactly the way they have,” Stevenson admits. “I think that [Nimona] has always had this transness and gender fluidity at its heart, but there are lines that have new meaning now, even from the first time I heard them recorded.”

The timing of the Nimona’s release may now offer an extra narrative layer for some audiences, but when it comes to the comics, Stevenson maintains his choices around characters’ gender, race and sexuality — as well as the story’s commentary about identity, power, community, love and understanding — were always intentional. They’re creative decisions the film takes to heart, even within its visuals, which are frequently about juxtaposition and contrast, according to production designer Aidan Sugano.

“It’s classic princess fairy tale versus futuristic dystopia. It’s truth versus expectation, light versus dark,” he said of the movie’s visual design during an April press day. “We really wanted to make sure that the closer you got to something, the more that you saw and you understood of that thing.”

Those visual choices help elevate the most poignant metaphors of Nimona’s characters, including those around one of the comic and film’s main villains, someone who both characters and viewers might look at and instantly trust. Instead, they represent “mundane evil that we run into the most often in the world,” Stevenson says; the people who feel “the ends justify the means” in the name of perceived safety, and who don’t think too far beyond “this is my job and this is what I will do because this is how things are done.”

For other characters, Nimona’s most poignant metaphors shift and expand for the film adaptation, which went through various iterations in the years it took to get to the screen. Stevenson says the idea to take Goldenloin from white to Asian and adapt his arc in a slightly different direction was something Bruno and Quane proposed as part of their process, which invited Stevenson’s input more than his early run with the film, where he had various levels of engagement.

“He is a pretty silly character in the comics. He’s a goofball, a dork. He’s also not a great person,” Stevenson says of Goldenloin. “The first thing he does is shoot Ballister’s arm off and refuse to apologize, and so they’ve had this terrible breakup. That’s what the comic is. It’s broken hearts and the refusal to apologize — a relationship that is almost beyond saving, it seems.”

The directors’ adaptation of Goldenloin results in the creation of a separate character, Sir Thoddeus Sureblade, who embodies the knight’s less desirable traits. Goldenloin then got a more complex narrative that still spoke to an underlying question Stevenson had while writing. That is, whether or not to lean on “something that makes things simpler” because it tells you what is right and wrong.

The final version of Goldenloin also ditched an early iteration’s jokes about Goldenloin’s hair, and “that he was even feminine in his presentation” — something that felt wrong to Stevenson. In the end, Yang’s character became an East Asian gay man treated as equally aspirational and complicated, with his relationship to Ahmed’s Ballister existing “onscreen in a positive way,” the Nimona creator says.

While the film’s storytelling is operating on multiple levels, when writing the original webcomic, Stevenson never felt it was a story that couldn’t be explored with kid audiences.

“I think [kids] are interested in the world beyond maybe what they’re supposed to see,” he continues. “And if you can do that in a responsible way that gives them a safe place to explore those things, I think it can be really profound.”

“Those lines are a little less clear than people think they are. With She-Ra, sometimes there would be concerns that they use the word insurgents, and are kids going to know what that is? No, probably not, but they’ll also probably be able to figure it out from context,” he says. “Overall, I just try to be truthful and try to — more than keeping it ‘appropriate’ — ask how you look at the world through the eyes of a lot of different people but include that point of view that makes it relatable to the audience.

Through talking with readers, then Nimona’s creative team and crew — who have shown their love for her “in every board panel” — and now viewers, Stevenson’s glimpsed some of that impact already. “I can’t describe how amazing it is to see her heal people through her own need for healing. I think that’s the power of her.”

How well the film adaptation is received — and then holds up amid Stevenson’s own desire to “make things that continue to stay relevant” — will be determined when Nimona debuts at the end of June. But regardless of the reception, his approach to story and character in Nimona is an approach the writer and artist is never going to give up. “I feel like I’m always trying to look at what I believe and figure out if it’s still what I believe,” he says, calling the act of self-assessment difficult ”and worth it” to do. “I’m never done with that, and I don’t feel like anyone should be.” 

Looking ahead, the writer and artist is currently working on a middle-grade book, getting used to the energy of navigating the demands of his first big press circuit and, creatively, thinking about more storytelling in his own voice and work. There are tales that are “somewhat separate and somewhat the same” to Nimona he wants to explore, including narratives around queer families and parentage — ”the relationship between children and the people who raised them and how it affects queer people, even in an implicit way.”

Having explored relationships between queer characters on She-Ra, it’s something that “feels like a natural extension.” But it’s also groundbreaking territory in an industry that has still struggled to tell animated LGBTQ stories with the same fullness as either his TV show and now the adaptation of his film. Still, he’s excited about the possibilities Nimona presents for the future of storytelling in animated cinema, on the heels of other game-changers like Turning Red.

“The idea of what you want to see in stories can actually be a really hard question because it’s asking us — everybody — to imagine something other than what we’ve seen,” he says. “But what seeing something like Turning Red does is it turns on the light in the next room, so I can walk into that room. And the next room is still dark, but with each new film [like Nimona] that breaks the mold, you can go turn on the light and head toward it.”

In a way, it’s a kind of torch-passing that takes the pressure and fear away from being a “first,” a space Stevenson has frequently found his work in. Instead, he’s allowed to think more about the torch “that was handed to me” and how his stories can help push the boundaries for more innovative animated movies going forward. 

“What’s cool about a torch is that once you have one, you can light another fire and it can go in all of these directions,” he says. “So I think the best possible thing is to just keep spreading that fire to as many rooms as you can.” 

A version of this story first appeared in the June 14 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.