'Nimona's directors and animators break down the film's delightful jailbreak
What do you get when you throw a shape-shifter and a knight in a broom closet? One of Nimona's most fun set pieces.
The sequence sees the rebellious Nimona (voiced by Chloë Grace Moretz) breaking Sir Ballister Boldheart (voiced by Riz Ahmed) out of the nefarious Institute. One wrong turn traps them in a broom closet, and the only way to escape the soldiers hunting them down is for Nimona to finally reveal her shape-shifting power and wreak absolute havoc. She does just that, and what follows is a delightful few minutes where Nimona goes on a rampage, all while Ballister hangs on for dear life.
As fun as the jailbreak is, it's also one of Nimona's most important scenes. This is the first time we see Nimona shape-shift, so it's the film's opportunity to show off the full extent of what she can do. The stakes are high: If we don't buy her powers in this moment, it would be nearly impossible for the film to recover.
Luckily, Nimona nails this entire action sequence, kicking off the Nimona-Ballister team-up with a salmon pink bang. To learn more about how the jailbreak sequence came to life, Mashable spoke with Nimona directors Nick Bruno and Troy Quane, animation director Ted Ty, and VFX supervisor Archie Donato. Ty and Donato both work at DNEG Animation, the studio that animated Nimona after Netflix and Annapurna revived it.
What makes Nimona's jailbreak such a great action scene?
For Bruno and Quane, the key to a great action sequence is character. "You can have the best action, but if you don't understand what's driving it, it doesn't matter," Quane told Mashable in a video call. "So for us, it's always, 'Who are the characters? What are they after in this particular moment in time that expresses their character, and then how can you build the action to support it?'"
"An action scene is a great instrument to play to add to the full musicality of the movie," added Bruno. "But if you play that one instrument too many times, it gets boring. You need to know when to play it and how to play it."
A jailbreak almost always demands an action sequence, and as both directors pointed out, Nimona and Ballister's emotions are running high as they try to escape from the Institute. The pressure of the situation prompts conflicting reactions from the two of them, creating a fun contrast that propels the action.
"Here's Nimona, desperately looking for someone to see who she is, and in that moment, once she starts shifting shape, she's elated. She's just energetic and happy and having a good time," Quane said. "In contrast, Ballister is a knight who's been taught to kill monsters, and he's just realized what he's teamed up with. Everything about his action is resistant."
He continued: "You've got one character completely thrilled and happy, another one completely resistant to it. That is what helps us drive the energy of the scene. Ballister is trying to get off this ride, and [Nimona's] trying to ramp it up."
How do you animate a shape-shifter?
With the knowledge of the character beats that would be driving the scene, the Nimona team faced the challenge of building a sequence around someone who can change into a whole zoo's worth of animals (and beyond). And since Nimona transforms throughout the whole movie, the film had to establish a visual language around how she changes shape.
"There's a whole broad range of ways that you can do transformations, but we wanted to avoid An American Werewolf in London-type grotesque changing," Ty told Mashable in a video call. "Really it was more fantasy[-inspired] and fluid, and we wanted to make sure shapes transition well into one another."
Just like with the film's action, Nimona's transformations are emotionally driven, so that informed how her Ty and his team visualized each transition, and especially their paces. "If Nimona was really fearful, they'd be quick and have stronger finishes," Ty explained. "And then when she was having fun, they would pop one into the other to be a bit more fun."
"At some point, Ted's team put together a couple of these transitions, and when I saw them I was like, 'That's it. It's done. We don't need to turn this into brain surgery, because this is exactly what we should be after,'" added Donato. "It was simple and yet insanely elegant and beautiful. That's what ND Stevenson [who wrote the graphic novel Nimona] does in his work as well."
From a VFX standpoint, much of what Donato, his fellow VFX supervisor Yancy Lindquist, and their team worked on for the transitions involved what happened between Nimona's source shape and target shape. "We were figuring out that middle part, where we used various geometrical lines and various little particulates that gave us the feel of 2D animation lines, but doing it in a 3D way," said Donato. You can see examples of this throughout the jailbreak sequence. Whenever Nimona transforms, it's punctuated by small bursts of pink sparkles or swirly lines. They add an extra layer of fun to the flashier, poppier transitions Ty and his team created.
Making order out of Nimona's chaos.
As we see throughout the jailbreak, Nimona loves nothing more than a little anarchy and the chaos that comes with it. But while her transformations may be spontaneous, the entire sequence showcasing her powers still had to be meticulously planned out. Like the rest of the film, the jailbreak was the result of constant communication across departments.
Ty and his team blocked the fight scenes and Nimona's transformations out with simple geometric shapes first. Then, in a process they called "Fight Club," they'd coordinate with layout, who control cameras and camera movement, to fully stage the scene. From there, the team coordinated with other departments to add gradually to the sequence until it reached its endpoint.
The trail of destruction Nimona leaves in her wake presented Donato and his team with its own set of challenges. "For us, the idea was really to key off the animation, because we needed to make sure that everything reacted while the world is coming to an end around them," he said. With crumbling statues in the Hall of Heroes to Nimona in whale form crashing through several floors of the Institute, these environmental details were no small feat.
"One of my favorite things about animation is you have all these talented artists, animators, and story artists, and there's a lot of fun brainstorming that goes on," said Bruno. "There's always this fun discussion happening between all these artists just to see, 'How do we make this the most entertaining thing possible?' And we always overshoot, and we say, 'That's too much' or 'That's not enough,' but that is one of the pure joys of doing what we do, is just watching these amazing artists bring a scene to life."
"Our mandate is almost always, 'Make us say you've gone too far,'" added Quane. "If you've gone too far, that way we know you haven't left anything off the table, as opposed to saying, 'Give us a little bit more.' That kind of conversation will take forever as opposed to just 'Go for it, and make us pull it back!' And this crew did not require that statement. They brought everything, every single time."