Nimona

 After a particularly hellish development, Nimona's finally made its way to Netflix. And the good news is that it's a fun, funny and heartfelt animated film that does justice to its source material (a series of webcomics that were collected into an excellent book in 2015). Now it's a cartoon with a presumably younger-skewing audience, they've had to sand down some of its sharper edges, change and simplify quite a few things, but the heart was left intact.

 Ballister Boldheart (Riz Ahmed) is about to be inducted into the Institute for Elite Knights - the first commoner to be knighted into the nobles-only club since its foundation a millennium ago. He's to become a protector of the kingdom - a retro-futuristic sci-fi walled city - along with his lover Ambrosius (Eugene Yang), but things go horribly wrong during the ceremony when his sword shoots and kills the Queen.
 On the run and missing an arm (seems the institute trains its knights to disarm people thoroughly), Ballister (Balls from now on) escapes to a cool ruined tower which he takes over as a lair.

 He doesn't get much peace. Soon after moving in and building himself a replacement robot arm, he gets a visit from a bubbly, possibly psychopathic teenager (Chloë Grace Moretz, very energetic), who introduces herself as Nimona and insists on becoming his evil sidekick.
 As they investigate, it quickly becomes clear that Balls has been framed by the head of the institute itself, and becomes a notorious outlaw as he attempts to clear his name. Mostly due to Nimona enthusiastically causing as much collateral damage as possible.

 Oh, yeah, it also turns out that Nimona is a shapeshifter, happily switching forms between a rhinoceros, cats, whales and a bunch of other animals. This understandably freaks Balls out and puts a strain in their relationship - he can't understand that the Nimona he knows is just a part of what she truly is, and tries to get her to act 'normal', to stay as a girl. The metaphor may elude its target audience, but it's solid, affecting, and well developed, if a bit on-the-nose.

 Plot-wise there will be misunderstandings, minor betrayals (perceived and direct), a pretty graphic (and touching) depiction of an attempted suicide -always a hit with the kids, those attempted suicide scenes- and, yes, a same-sex kiss. There are also a lot of very fun kick-ass action scenes, some really good jokes, and some eye-popping, colourful, very dynamic animation. It's pretty good!

 Not as good or as funny as the comic, which had much more room to breathe and make its revelations more organic. Nimona could afford to be a real psycho there and rack up a body count, and the story could let Balls start out as a villain and reveal his backstory later (it gets a huge amount of mileage in the early going from Nimona questioning comic-book villainy.) There are a lot of other changes made for the movie, but they're the sort of thing you'd expect when cramming a comic that ran for years into a hundred minutes; I may be misremembering, but it felt like shackling Nimona with PG restraints does the story the biggest disservice.

 Despite everything, It's a pretty decent adaptation.
 Especially when you consider it originated with Blue Sky Studios, the makers of Ice Age and other, even lesser animated movies. Thankfully this is more in the vein of their underrated Peanuts adaptation.

 The story for this one is fascinating - the movie was in mid-production when Blue Sky was acquired by Disney, and after several delays, it was shut down by the new management, explicitly due to its content. It seems Rodent House has a strict policies against overt LGBT themes; have that in mind whenever you're tempted to praise them for their wokeness/accuse them of corrupting the youth or whatever.
 To be fair, the movie is a rough fit for Disney's tame, extremely safe sensibilities - beyond any 'contemporary concerns', it's simply too anarchic for them. Even a dull edge can scare away big money.

 In any case, things were very pretty far along at the time of cancellation - according to Wikipedia, quoting co-director Troy Quane: "the film was approximately "70% through layout": they had completed five fully animated sequences, along with character models, story reels, and locations at the time of Blue Sky's shut down."
 Annapurna picked up the rights and handed the project off to DNEG Animation. They managed to find a way to replicate the existing style and finish the movie, which sounds to me like a Herculean task - good job for pulling it off, folks.

 The animation style looks great, if a little cheap sometimes, with simple character designs full of geometric patterns - angular for the knights, rounded and ridiculously fluid for Nimona herself. All the low-detail stylization looks pretty good when inserted into the more detailed 3D environments and lighting. I didn't much care for the design of some of the secondary characters, but all the principals are very expressive and Nimona in particular is a delight.
 The movie fittingly hits its peaks when Nimona is transitioning between forms with abandon, showing her inner life in a riot of color and action, or in one memorable scene, pitch-black depression. This is her show, and she thoroughly owns it.