[Editor’s note: The following interview contains spoilers for “Nimona.”]
Netflix‘s “Nimona” (now streaming) represents the latest post “Spider-Verse” animated breakthrough in handmade-looking 2D stylization. The twist here was creating a futuristic medieval fantasy that mixes “Sleeping Beauty” with “Blade Runner.” Fortunately, DNEG Animation (“Entergalactic”) answered the SOS after the trouble-plagued adaptation of ND Stevenson’s queer graphic novel about the titular teen shapeshifter (Chloë Grace Moretz) came back from the dead. That’s because Annapurna Animation and the streamer rescued the Blue Sky feature after Disney shuttered the Fox-owned animation studio in 2021.
“We obviously followed it really closely, what happened to Blue Sky,” DNEG VFX supervisor Archie Donato told IndieWire. “We knew that they were shutting down. It was all over media and everything, so it was incredibly heartbreaking because we had many, many friends working there. We actually hired a lot of their animators and people in lighting and compositing and other departments. So we managed to save some jobs by bringing them to us and working remotely from Canada.”
But DNEG was very busy juggling various projects, including Netflix’s “Entergalactic,” another breakthrough in creating a graphically illustrated look. In fact, DNEG revamped its pipeline for the Emmy hopeful, which spanned animation, shading, lighting, compositing, and rendering.
While DNEG leveraged many of these new tools for “Nimona,” it also created several new ones for trickier lighting on characters and environments and for compositing hundreds of motion graphics to help punctuate Nimona’s emotional outbursts.
Directed by Nick Bruno and Troy Quane (“Spies in Disguise”), the film concerns rebellious Nimona teaming up with legendary knight Lord Ballister (Riz Ahmed), who’s falsely accused of murder. However, their xenophobic society also targets Nimona because of her shapeshifting abilities.
In translating the look of Stevenson’s graphic novel, production designer Aidan Sugano drew on Stevenson’s basic shape language for the curvy and chunky Nimona and the square-looking Ballister. He also took inspiration from two mid-century illustrators: Disney background artist Eyvind Earle (“Sleeping Beauty”) and wildlife artist Charley Harper, borrowing the elegant fluidity of the former and the geometric minimalism of the latter. But Sugano made sure the world building had modern appeal with billboards, holograms, and “Blade Runner”-like neon lighting.
“There were some sequences that were worked on at Blue Sky, but the actual look of the film in translating the designer’s vision had not gone too far,” Donato said. “So we wanted to do justice to that. But Nick and Troy wanted to also make use of this opportunity to push it further because we were basically starting from scratch.”
In essence, DNEG became animated shapeshifters by taking Blue Sky’s designs and assets (mostly still in layout form) and crafting the film to fit their pipeline. The directors wanted a flatter 2D look than “Entergalactic,” which was achieved by breaking up the character lighting into layers. DNEG removed all ambient occlusion lighting and added sharp lines everywhere to make clear separations between the layers of lights. This particularly came in handy for the densely-packed, medieval metropolis.
“I’ve done different styles,” Donato added, “but the way Nick and Troy wanted it is how they would paint it as an illustration, not how the light would really disperse. So we designed a different way of doing it. Basically, we gave it very short fall-off, so instead of having the larger glows around the characters and environment, they were more like soft glows. We designed hard graphical glows but used them more like graphical overlays on top.”
An early test in the lair where Nimona and Ballister are hiding helped lock in this technique. The place is cluttered and they wanted to overload the frame, particularly on Nimona’s “murder wall” containing drawings of her hit list. It was important to have that stand out as a fixture behind them.
“What I wanted to do is to put together an image and then deconstruct that and understand what it would take to do this movie, “Donata said, “because the idea was that we had to use heavy, heavy compositing in the show, more so than in many other animated films. And the reason why was because we needed to treat elements separately from each other.
“The other thing was matte paintings,” he continued. So instead of using depth of field or haze and stuff like that, we reduced the detail the farther you go. We call it depth desktop detail. It gives you the sense of depth, even though it’s a completely flat image.”
Meanwhile, a lot of animation was devoted to Nimona’s shapeshifting characters, which included a rhino, cat, gorilla, wolf, and whale. These were given the signature pink, curvy, and chunky look but some were more fantastical with giant proportions.
However, there’s a darker, villainous shadow creature, which required a lot more complexity. After much experimentation, they settled on a hard body character with a smoke effect composited on top. “So basically we rigged the character like we normally would rig a hard-body character,” said Donato. “We did all of the gray-shaded animation that was approved by Nick and Troy. But they took a major chance. They knew the components worked well separately, but they didn’t know if they were gonna work together. And they didn’t know what it was gonna look like at the end. So we put together one shot of the creature coming through the city. We did the full test like it was a final delivery.”
It was nerve-wracking for the animation and VFX teams. But it worked because of the base character underneath. “So we got rid of the actual hard body and instead replaced that with the smokey elements in there,” Donato said. “That was supposed to react to the motion of the creature, so that’s why it was incredibly critical for the animation to be good. The velocity of the smoke, how the creature swings its arms, how the smoke would trail off, everything was based on the actual speed and movement of the creature.”
Yet the sequence took place at night, and it was important not to lose track of the shadow creature. “So we started bright and dropped it off gradually as the city expanded,” added Donato. “That drove the audience’s eye to stay on the creature. Nick and Troy really wanted to make sure that it was really impactful.”
