BURBANK – In the new Netflix animated film Nimona, the titular character makes its first appearance as a red-headed teenage girl before transforming into a charging rhino, then a grizzly, then a songbird and so on, with brief stopovers as a gorilla, an ostrich and an armadillo.

After Ballister Boldheart (voiced by Riz Ahmed) – a prim, by-the-book knight – asks her, “Can you please just be normal for a second?”, he wonders if all that shape-shifting hurts.

“Honestly? I feel worse when I don’t do it,” replies Nimona (Chloe Grace Moretz).

American cartoonist ND Stevenson, who wrote and drew the graphic novel on which the film is based, said he had always loved shape-shifters.

But the movie iteration of Nimona explores elements of the trans experience – the clumsy questions from well-meaning friends, the outright hatred from strangers – only hinted at in his award-winning book, a beloved staple of the LGBTQ literary canon.

“The themes have their roots in the comic,” said Stevenson. “But it would be years before I came out as gay, years before I came out as trans. Narratives have been my way of exploring those identities, even as allegory.”

The film, which is available on Netflix, brings those themes to the fore at a time when trans rights have come increasingly under attack.

“We knew what we were doing,” Stevenson said of the film-makers. “We knew what we wanted to say.”

He added: “But, even back then, I don’t think any of us knew how bleak things were going to get, the backlash against trans and queer people, and how much the movie was going to speak to that.”

Nimona focuses on the budding friendship between Nimona and Ballister, who is wrongly accused of murdering his queen. The film also features a star-crossed romance between Ballister, who is already mistrusted because he is a commoner among nobles, and Ambrosius Goldenloin, a dreamy, lovesick knight (Eugene Lee Yang).

“This is a story that, at its heart, is a love letter to anybody who’s ever felt different or misunderstood,” said American film-maker and animator Troy Quane, who directed the movie along with Nick Bruno.

The film had its beginnings in 2015, the same year the book was published, and is the rarest of Hollywood literary makeovers.

For decades, gay characters and relationships in literary classics were straightwashed on the big screen, whether in The Maltese Falcon (1941), Breakfast At Tiffany’s (1961) or The Color Purple (1985).

In Nimona, the story became more queer-friendly on its way to Hollywood, not less.

For Stevenson, much of the book spoke to his own upbringing and experiences. “Coming from a really conservative family and the evangelical church in the South,” he said, “the story is definitely a reaction to that.”

The 31-year-old was born and raised in Columbia, South Carolina, the middle child of five siblings. After years of home-schooling and two more at the local high school, he went to the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he began posting Nimona comics online in 2012, a project that became his senior thesis.

“When I started making the comic, I didn’t consider myself a writer,” he said. “I was in school for illustration. But comics was kind of my way of tricking myself into thinking like, no, I am a writer.”

Online, the series quickly gained fans and, in graphic novel form, Nimona won several awards including an Eisner, the comics industry’s most prestigious honour, and was a National Book Award finalist. Stevenson was 24.

That year, Fox Animation acquired the rights to make an animated feature based on the comic, and called on Blue Sky Studios – which is behind the Ice Age franchise (2002 to 2016) – to make it.

The next five years were busy and creative ones. In addition to adapting Nimona, Stevenson collaborated with several others in creating and writing Lumberjanes, an Eisner-winning comic book series set in a summer camp for “hardcore lady types”.

He also became the showrunner of the DreamWorks series She-Ra And The Princesses Of Power (2018 to 2020), a fantastical, queer-friendly reboot of the 1980s cartoon, which went on to win an Emmy and a Glaad Media Award.

In 2020, Stevenson published the memoir The Fire Never Goes Out, a collection of “year in review” comics that run from his college days and subsequent creative triumphs to his marriage, in 2019, to fellow cartoonist and writer Molly Ostertag.

In the book, Stevenson writes about coming out, the joys of life with Molly, and his struggles with body image and mental health. In several, he draws himself with an enormous hole in the centre of his torso or consumed by flames.

“I can’t literally grab my emotions and shape them into something that makes sense,” he said. “But I can wrestle with a drawing and try to make it make sense.”

Meanwhile, at Blue Sky, the film-makers worked to find the heart of Nimona, a way into a character who was, by definition, ever-changing and hard to define.

“It was a difficult thing to capture,” said 26-year-old American actress Moretz. “It was so fun, but I would come home and I would look at my partner and be like, I can’t talk. I can’t do anything but rest.”

In 2021, Disney, which had acquired Blue Sky in its acquisition of Fox, shuttered the studio and Nimona with it, only two days before a planned screening for the cast and crew. “Just like that, 450 people were out of a job,” Stevenson recalled. “It was heartbreaking.”

The team decided to go ahead with the screening, a premiere of sorts as well as a goodbye. “No one wanted to click out of the Zoom meeting,” Quane recalled.

The following year, after the creators spent months shopping the project, Annapurna Pictures opted to revive the film. “We all got together and just wanted to cry, because we were like, Nimona survived,” Moretz said. “It was such a testament to who she is, and her resilience.”

If you want to watch the film as a trans allegory, there is certainly a lot there. But if you just want to watch a beautifully animated adventure story filled with castles, knights, laser cannons and flying cars, starring a shape-shifting force of nature who likes to blow stuff up, there is that too.

Stevenson thinks there is room for both readings.

“My opinions of that continue to evolve,” said Stevenson, who is working on developing Lumberjanes and a project based on a novel he wrote at 15. “On the one hand, I think that explicit representation is really important. But I also know there’s certain media that I never would have got to read as a kid if it had been marketed that way.”

He added: “I think if I were making the comic now, there’s a lot more I would have done with it, and it’s cool to see the movie do that. But I also think there’s a certain power in having a story that clearly expresses that, but maybe flies under the radar of parents who might be less willing to put that book in their kids’ hands.” NYTIMES

Nimona is available on Netflix.