If you want to get my attention, promise me an animated movie about a shapeshifter, and I’m there! There are just some things that animation does better than all the elaborate CGI in the world: shapeshifting is definitely one of them.

Also, weirdly, Spider-Man. The non-animated Spider-Man movies get better and better, and yet… the best action is in the Spider-Verse movie, and I can not wait to see the installment currently in theaters.

(I would call them out by name, but I have a bit of a problem with prepositions. Into the Spider-Verse, Across the Spider-Verse, Through the Spider-Verse, Below the cloud, Above the cloud–It all sounds about the same to me, so I can’t actually tell which one is the one in the theaters now.)

Anyway! Animated shapeshifters for the win!

Dungeons and Dragons was very appealing, do not get me wrong. But watching Nimona’s madcap flight through the palace with Ballister in tow made me laugh in a way I haven’t since the Emperor’s New Groove and their potion-driven shapeshifting shenanigans.

As for the movie itself…. I loved it. I haven’t read the webcomic the movie was based on, and looking at its synopsis versus the movie…. I think the movie is more to my taste. Lighter. Sillier. Pinker. So much pinker.

But what I really loved about Nimona? The thing that made me shriek with glee, stop the movie and go on a familiar rant to my long-suffering housemate? That it’s a fantasy world that moves with the time. A thousand years pass and they change in technology! It’s not a static, frozen landscape! I have DNFed so many books where eons have passed and the culture doesn’t change even in the smallest of ways. (Fairy folk get a pass. Classically, that’s their thing. They don’t change. They live in perpetual twilight and stasis.)

The dialogue in Nimona was fast and funny, landing almost as many gags as they tried for. That art was appealing. The bad guy was very bad. The good guys were conflicted and learned better. The pacing… is a little wonky. I, personally, am not a huge fan of complex flashback scenes–especially at otherwise pivotal emotional moments. But overall, a very enjoyable movie that I will watch again.