By Annapurna Interactive
I watched this on the flight to Cairo, on 18 Dec 2024.
It’s about a cadet who, on the day of his knighting, is framed for murdering the queen. He goes underground, and meets a very odd girl, who, when he gets caught, busts him out of jail and reveals that she’s a shapeshifter. They work to get to the bottom of who framed him and why, and discover that it was the director of the Knight’s Institute, which was set up a thousand years ago to protect the city from a monster outside the walls. They reveal this fact to the city, only for the knight to then discover that the girl is the same being, who only wishes to not be alone. They drive her away, only for her despair and grief to metastasise her into the same monster. She charges into the city, and in her sadness is about to impale herself, but is stopped by the knight. Realising the director is about to fire a cannon into the city to kill her, which will also kill lots of innocents, she turns into a gigantic phoenix, and sacrifices herself, breaking the wall and revealing the world outside.
A spectacular movie! The animation was very pretty, with some of the same innovation and style as Arcane and the Spiderverse movies. It’s definitely a kids movie, but the sense of humour is fantastic in parts, and I particularly liked the world building, where the city had a sort of techno-mediaeval feel with Tudor houses and knights combined with drones, public displays, a metro, and hovercars.
The voice acting was spectacular, particularly from Nimona, whose scream of despair and longing as she is about to impale herself is devastating.
It’s also got a surprisingly sophisticated set of themes, around what we valorise, and whom we ostracise. The kids throughout the film are shown to be encouraged to be heroic by killing monsters and villains, and the Institute deploys this language to great effect, calling the framed knight a villain, and Nimona a monster.
The slow process of the unravelling of the Knight’s worldview was also particularly well done, with the knock that the director framed him only leading him to ask his knight boyfriend for help instead, believing that the Institute is still an important and valuable institution. It’s only when the entire place turns against him that he realises the very goals and values the Institute stands for, and which he embodies, are rotten to the core and need to be changed.
I did think some of it could have been set up slightly better - for example, the knight, being the first commoner to be knighted, is shown to face resistance from the population, but it’s never the youth and urban population who are resistant to change, but old people.
Still, a very good watch. The shapeshifting is done tremendously well, it’s very funny, and the animation is gorgeous.