It’s the last few days of International Pride Month, and with many of the parades and other celebratory activities out the way, you may be wondering how you can still tap into the spirit of the occasion.
Since its release in June last year, we’ll always recommend a viewing of Nimona, the CGI-animated fantasy based on the web comic by ND Stevenson, about an anarchistic shape-shifter (voiced by Chloë Grace Moretz) and her friendship with disgraced knight Ballister Boldheart (Riz Ahmed). While we never wrote a review for Oscar-nominated and Annie Award-winning Nimona, it’s an ultra-rare 10/10 no notes movie for us – as all-round inventive as it is emotionally resonant, and saturated in LGBT+ themes.
At Comic Con Cape Town this year, we were pleasantly surprised to find that one of Nimona’s two directors, Troy Quane (who helmed the movie, as well as Spies in Disguise, with Nick Bruno), was a guest at the convention’s co-located Cape Town International Animation Festival 2024.
Thanks to the Comic Con organisers and PR team we got to sit down with Troy, and delve into the behind-the-scenes drama that saw Nimona scrapped as a result of Disney’s Fox acquisition and later revived through Annapurna Pictures, DNEG Animation and Netflix joining forces. It’s a fascinating against-the-odds tale that mirrors the scrappiness of Nimona’s title character, and makes the success of the finished film that much more gratifying.
Troy was so accommodating and open with his experience that we ended up chatting for quite a while. As such, the interview will be split into two more digestible parts. Here is Part One, which covers Nimona’s rocky path to release, the determination of those involved to get it across the finishing line, and the universal, relatable feelings at the film’s heart.
Noelle (Pfangirl.com): Long before Nimona took the world by storm, back when you came on board the project, did you realise what you had in terms of how special it was?
Troy Quane: I think anytime you approach a project, you want it to be great; you put your heart and soul into it. But your first goal is to make an entertaining film. I’m an entertainer first, I’m a storyteller. But then my obligation is to do it in a very truthful, honest way.
And there was just such a specific story behind Nimona. It felt like to do it right, was to be honest about the material, to be honest about the LGBTQ+ themes, the ideas of acceptance. The movie just became this love letter to anybody who’s felt other or different or outside of the expected norms. We just focused on that and being as honest about those concepts as possible.
So I think it’s always a weird thing if you go into a project saying “This is gonna be important”, it feels like you get preachy. Let’s just tell an honest story with real characters and be as truthful as possible. I’m so thrilled when someone likes it, but I’ve been very humbled and surprised by how connected and how much impact it’s had on people.
Nimona had a notoriously disrupted development. Were you able to keep a core creative team or did that shift as the film moved between studios?
Troy Quane: The movie was set up with Fox, with Blue Sky, before Disney shut down the studio. So really, our first hope was to keep the whole studio running, but we couldn’t quite manage that. It was 500 people.
But the core creative team – myself, my directing partner (Nick Bruno), and our lead character designer who became our production designer – did stick with it and it was amazing. Because, the movie was dead, the studio was shut down, people moved on and got other jobs, but we managed to pull it back together and be like, “I’m in.” There was this need for people to finish the journey, which was incredible. It was that heart that saved the film, that connection to the characters and the movie.
Those key people came back when we moved over to DNEG, which was our production partner, and a lot of the other animators who had moved on to other projects actually took jobs at DNEG just because, again, they wanted to come back and finish the journey started at Blue Sky when it shut down.
That kind of leads into my next question. With all the upheaval and uncertainty, how was it, mentally and psychologically? To keep that enthusiasm and the hope alive?
Troy Quane: Some days it’s hard, you have to get out of bed and you’re like, “All right, we can do this”. But when you believe in what you’re doing…
So, the natural state for any film is to not get made; most movies just don’t want to get made. It is the sheer force of will from the people making them that forces them into existence.
Nimona was a bit more so than the norm. It just felt like you had something special and it felt like we just needed to finish that. So when you see people that connected and that passionate about it, it helps fuel you and you realise that you have this obligation to finish it up. My job as a director, my only job, is to try and feed passion to the people who are making the film. So, you get up every morning and you do your best to try and cheerlead everyone along.
What was the gap between Nimona’s death and resurrection?
Troy Quane: We found out in February of 2021 that they were going to close the studio in April. So there was that four month period. And then by the time we partnered up with Annapurna and Megan Ellison and then got DNEG on board, I think that was October or November of the same year, so about six, seven months.
So quite a while to be in stall mode?
Troy Quane: Yeah, exactly. Especially because stall mode is like, nothing happening. As soon as they announced that they were closing the studio in April, everything stopped. We didn’t work those last three months because nothing was going to happen.
Nimona is obviously a very personal story for ND Stevenson. How did you tap into it? How did you relate to Nimona’s story?
Troy Quane: It was such a personal story, like you read the pages again and you just realise it. I think it was more deeply personal than ND even realised when he was crafting it. I think there was a lot of catharsis in creating that story that even he will say, looking back, “Oh, that was the story I was telling that I didn’t even know because I was in the middle of it, right? “
And for me, it’s so evident on the page what that story was, but I think in being so specific, it actually becomes very universal. I think the amazing thing with Nimona is we created that character very specifically, we told the stories of Ballister and Ambrosius who are very specific characters with a very specific relationship. But it’s amazing how that has still related to so many different people because I think everyone has on some level that feeling of wanting to change some aspect of themselves to fit in, or at the very least to not stand out, right? I think every teenager can attest to going through that on different levels. Some people go through it to a much higher and greater degree, and there may be different motivating factors, but everyone sort of knows that feeling of being outside of things.
That is sort of the universal feeling that I know I could tap into, because I know it very much. Every day there’s some aspect of like, oh, you know, I get up in front of like 500 people in a studio and I’m like, “Are they gonna like me? Are they gonna listen to me?” Everyone has those feelings of wanting to connect. And I think that’s the beauty of Nimona.
With Nimona’s move from Fox and Blue Sky (and then Disney), over to Annapurna, was there a sense of freedom or relief that you had more breathing room to deal with both darker and LGBT+ themes?
Troy Quane: Huge, oh huge. With full transparency, it was really hard under the Disney banner. They have a very specific brand, while they’re willing to dip their toe into the pool of “certain things”, it was dipping. Whereas we were like, “Let’s just cannonball into the deep end; just do it, be honest.” There’s an opportunity here and a story that, in its DNA, should be told. We did get a lot of pushback on how we wanted to be very upfront about character relationships and genderqueer representation, and there was pushback in return.
But then we went from being a big studio film to an independent movie. And once we were set up with Annapurna. I mean, the whole reason is Megan Ellison. It was the most baller Hollywood move ever. Because, when you talk about studios now it’s all like, “Well, this will make this much money, and we invest this and this is the bottom line.” And Megan was just like, “This movie needs to exist. It needs to exist because I wish I had had something like this when I was young, it would have made a lot of aspects of my life a lot less painful.” So for her, it was less about “this is a great investment opportunity,” it was more like “this just needs to be in the world”.
And because of that, the mandate was to take the brakes off. Just do what is right for the story; tell the story. Even Netflix, I will say they were amazing. They didn’t once ask us to adjust anything content-wise. They were very supportive of the story we were trying to tell, who the characters were, the thematics that we were going for.
It was the most amazing creative experience and then equally terrifying! You’re used to being able to go, “If only the executives had got out of my way, this movie would have been great.” And all of a sudden, well, there are no executives in your way. So if the movie didn’t work out, there was no one to blame but yourself. So it was exhilarating and terrifying in the same sense, but it allowed the movie to be what it wanted and needed to be.
In Part 2 of our interview with Troy, we explore such topics as making an animated movie through a pandemic, what it feels like to be Oscar nominated, what didn’t make Nimona’s final cut, and the state of the animation industry today.