Thursday 22 February 2024

Nimona (2023)

It looks great, it's well-directed and it's fun enough. (Also cool to get some fully embedded queer rep and themes.)

But it also feels pretty sloppy in a bunch of areas. 
The writing has that 'if we say everything loud and fast it'll be funny' thing, plus that 'we've learnt the rhythm of this style of humour without really coming up with the clever jokes to go in it'.
The setting is a mash-up of medieval, modern day, and sci-fi future, and they needed to drop at least one of those because there's a bunch of overlap and redundancy and gags that are delivered like they're one of those 'modern day but X' Pixar jokes and yet is just 'modern day'. It feels again like they copied a joke format without understanding it, or they just didn't dare make it straight fantasy or get too close to Onward. (I don't know how close it is to the webcomic in how it handles this stuff.)
The writing is too vague when it comes to what characters know or are feeling, which is exacerbated by the 'if they just plainly said this thing' issue.
And there's a whiplash-inducing tonal shift towards the end, so most of the movie is silly gag-a-second comedy and then the last twenty or so minutes are po-faced trans allegory, story reveals and melodrama.

I think the fact that I wrote out so much instead of saying "it's shit" goes to show how frustratingly close to good this was. I was close to noting it down for recommendation to a friend's kid at one point, but I think he'd probably lose interest in it pretty much at the same rate I did.

Stick to Emperor's New Groove or Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs.

Rating: good-looking but irritatingly sloppy.

No comments: