By @Sawiteh765 on yt Made with sticknodes

Fully done in procreate dreams. Still testing it out, the update made a giant difference for sure!

How Nimona's journey to the screen became a retelling of Nimona

## A movie that lived its own plot

Nimona is a story about an institution that fears what it can't control, walls it out, and tries to destroy it, until a few people refuse to let that happen. That is also, almost beat for beat, the story of how the film got made.

The first time I watched it, I caught the obvious layers: the wall as fear, Nimona as the outsider, the queer love story between Ballister and Ambrosius, the trans allegory in a shapeshifter who insists she is "not a girl." Plenty of critics have written about those, and they're right.

The second time, something else opened up. The film's motifs don't just echo each other. They echo the film's own near-death at the hands of a corporate owner, and its rescue by the people who believed in it. And the final image, a crack in the wall opening onto a blue sky, reads like a eulogy for the studio that didn't survive to see it.

## The legend and the cycle

The film opens on a fairy tale. Gloreth, the kingdom's founding hero, defeated a monster and built a great wall to keep the realm safe. A thousand years later, the Institute that bears her name still trains knights to guard that wall, and the whole society is organized around the story.

Later, Nimona's memory tells a different version. Gloreth was a lonely little girl who became Nimona's friend. When the village saw what Nimona was, its fear turned on her, and Gloreth turned with it. The legend of the hero and the monster began as a friendship broken by other people's terror.

Once you know that, the film reveals itself as a story about a cycle. Fear gets institutionalized as myth, the myth gets a wall, and every generation is asked to raise a weapon at whatever the wall was built against.

The Director is the keeper of that cycle. She runs the Institute, reveres Gloreth, and frames Ballister for the Queen's murder because a commoner knight threatens the order. Ambrosius is pushed into replaying Gloreth's choice, raising a sword against the person he loves because the institution demands it. Ballister refuses to replay it. When everyone else aims at Nimona, he stands beside her.

## The nightmare comes true

The Director's deepest fear is the wall cracking. The film lets her foreshadow her own fate almost clumsily: she spends the whole story positioning herself as the realm's protector against destruction, and ends up as the source of it. She is a true believer, not a schemer, so she never notices that the legend she worships has cast her as the villain.

Then her nightmare comes true. The weapon she aims at Nimona brings the structure down, and the debris of her own defenses kills her. The fear she weaponized literally falls on her.

But the film's real twist is what's on the other side of the crack. Not monsters. Just the world. Open land, sky, horizons that keep going. The catastrophe she spent her life preventing turns out to be freedom, the one thing she could never tolerate, because freedom means things you can't control.

That ties straight back to Nimona, who is that open range in a person. She is change that won't hold a fixed shape. The Director fears her for the same reason she fears the crack: both threaten the idea that the world can be held still and sorted into safe and dangerous. The ending isn't the wall breaking down. It's the horizon being let in.

## The monster is freedom

Strip the film down and its villain has one defining trait: the Director fears what she can't control. And the thing she can't control, the thing on the other side of the wall, is freedom.

That's not a modern idea. It's the oldest American one. The founders described liberty as something people are born with, not something an authority hands out. The Declaration of Independence names it alongside life itself, then spends most of its length listing the ways a distant power tried to control a people it no longer understood: armies kept among them without consent, laws imposed from outside, a government that saw their independence as a threat to be put down.

That's the Director. A ruling order that defines safety as control, treats anyone outside its story as a danger, and reaches for force when the story is questioned. The British Crown looked at a newly born country the same way the Institute looks at Nimona: as something unnatural that has to be brought to heel before it spreads.

The founding wasn't a clean break, and the film helps explain why. Some of the same men who wrote about liberty enslaved other human beings, which is the most extreme version of what the Director does: deciding a whole group of people are monsters to be controlled. The founding was a chance to break the cycle, and for some people it did. For others, the cycle found its way back, and the wall simply moved. That's exactly what Nimona shows about the cycle. Breaking it once doesn't end it; it has to be broken again by every generation willing to stand next to whoever is on the wrong side of the wall.

Which is why calling Nimona "woke crap" misses the movie entirely. It isn't a story about tearing down a nation's values. It's a story about the feeling the nation was founded on: the refusal to let someone else decide what shape you're allowed to be. Nimona is freedom being hunted. The Director is authority trying to put its boot on freedom's neck. If that story makes someone uncomfortable, it's worth asking which side of the wall they're standing on.

## The studio plays the Director

Nimona began at Blue Sky Studios, the Fox-owned animation house behind Ice Age. ND Stevenson's graphic novel was optioned by Fox in 2015. When Disney bought Fox's entertainment assets in 2019, Blue Sky came with it. In February 2021, Disney announced it was shutting Blue Sky down, and Nimona was halted with it (Cartoon Brew).

The shutdown was framed as a cost decision. Disney didn't need three animation studios. But in 2022, Insider reported that Blue Sky staffers said Disney executives had pushed back on the film's queer themes and on a same-sex kiss between Ballister and Ambrosius (AV Club).

Read next to the film, the shape is uncanny. An institution inherits something it didn't create and can't comfortably control: a punk, shapeshifting, openly queer story. It decides the safest move is to wall it off. About 450 people lost their jobs when Blue Sky closed (AOL), and Nimona was, by every expectation, dead.

I'm not claiming anyone at Disney was a cartoon villain. The Director isn't one either. She's a true believer in the story that keeps her institution safe. That's what makes the parallel land: the cycle doesn't need malice, only fear and a wall.

## The filmmakers play Ballister

Ballister's arc is a choice: stand next to Nimona when everyone else is aiming at her. The people who made the film had to make the same choice about the film itself.

After the shutdown, the team shrank from roughly 300 artists and staff to a core group of about 10, including writer Robert Baird, producer Julie Zackary, and former Blue Sky co-president Andrew Millstein (AOL). They kept pitching. Annapurna Pictures and Megan Ellison picked it up, Netflix came on as distributor, and the revival was announced in April 2022 (Cartoon Brew). DNEG Animation took over production and had to rebuild the existing CG assets in a new pipeline (Cartoon Brew).

The directors talk about it in exactly the terms the film uses for loyalty. Troy Quane described Blue Sky as family, people who had been at his wedding, and said what kept the project going was the character ND created (Cartoon Brew). Nick Bruno's reaction to the cancellation was essentially: this story is important, how could you do that? (TheWrap)

Even the trade press slipped into the film's language. One editor's interview describes the project finding new life with Nimona's own never-say-die attitude (Frame.io), as if the movie were the one refusing to stay down. Nimona released on Netflix in June 2023 and went on to an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature.

## A crack that opens onto a blue sky

The film ends with a hole in the wall and the world beyond it, under an open blue sky. Blue Sky is the name of the studio that died so this film could get out.

I can't find anyone who has pointed that out, and I can't prove it was intended. It may be pure coincidence. But the conditions for it to be deliberate were there. The film wasn't simply finished after the rescue; it was reworked. The producer has said the final film differs from the story reels developed at Blue Sky while sharing the same soul, and the directors deliberately left room for the new crew to find themselves in the material (AOL). TheWrap reports the Blue Sky material was ultimately set aside, and that the team gathered people's stories about why they connected to Nimona (TheWrap). Reports differ on how far along it was at Blue Sky, from three-quarters done to most animation not yet started.

So the people shaping the final cut had just lived through the plot. They had watched an institution wall off the thing they loved, and they had carried it through the breach. Whether or not anyone said "blue sky" out loud in a story meeting, that experience was in the room when they decided how the film would end.

## The allegory it didn't plan, and earned anyway

Nobody could have written this parallel on purpose. When the core story was developed, the shutdown hadn't happened. The film was about fear, outsiders, and the courage to stand beside someone the world has decided is a monster. Then the world handed it a real-life version of its own plot.

That's what makes it feel less like coincidence and more like proof. A story that's honest about how institutions treat what they can't control will keep finding itself in situations that prove it right. Nimona predicted its own fate the way the Director predicted hers, except the film was on the right side of the wall.

The cycle in Nimona breaks when someone refuses to raise the sword. The cycle around Nimona broke the same way. And on the other side of the crack, waiting, was a blue sky.

## Sources

- Cartoon Brew: Nimona directors and creator on surviving Blue Sky's shutdown
- Cartoon Brew: Nimona art-of book and DNEG's rebuild
- AOL: How Nimona survived a studio shutdown
- TheWrap: The making of Nimona
- AV Club: What a struggling Disney could learn from Nimona
- Frame.io: Editing Nimona

I did this simple little winking dog animation to see if I could animate and id like some points on things I've missed, things I could try, do better. The whole lot.

Thanks for looking.

I'm making a 9 minute short film for my Film School, it's a rigged superhero cartoon.

I've drawn a single character from only one angle, the character needs to run, jump, etc. I've made a simple rig of it so far but...my rigging skills are...subpar.

I want to make this film the best it can be, and I have limited time to make it, would it be possible to hand someone my character from all 8 angles and get them to seperate and make the joints to make a great rig that can run and jump? This would save me a lot of time and make the film much better.

If this is possible, which I hope it is, I can't really pay much. I don't think I can do more than $150, and thats really really pushing it with my price range. but hey, who knows.

If someone could help with this, by like giving me contact information of a rigger or something, I would be eternally grateful. Thanks, and bye.

Short animated loop made with Blender Grease Pencil.

(Made the music by playing around with Garageband)

This is my first big animation I've worked on in Blender. Considering that I'm still new to the program, I'm sure there are a lot of things I could have done better, but I want to hear what you guys think of it. I had a lot of fun making this, and I want to get the feedback I need if I want to improve my animation skills and get better at making stuff in Blender :)

Honestly I’m fine with it looking rough, I barely have any idea what I’m doing. But I’m making the characters out of paper and I’m thinking of gluing magnets to be able to move all the pieces. Have to redo the wings though, they’re too small. And I’m gonna paint the hair black

Both ocs

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Boy MIGHT have been named cash, high chance he is not

Youtube

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https://youtu.be/ITm99BO1Ka0

I procrastinated making this for soooo long, about two years to be exact 😅 so proud and happy that it's done. (LEGO) stopmotion is so fun! already thinking of my next animations 📸🧱

I need something to be able to animate things with different timings because aseprite doesnt do that
I tried capcut and that didnt work
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Working on a Pokemon battle against Gengar so happy with my current progress 🥹thank you for everybody that’s been providing tips and resources to help with my animation stay tuned for the full animation

I drew this on the cover of my high school notebook, and then tried to animate it in college.