Nimona’s creator wanted one crucial thing unchanged in the Netflix movie

polygon.com:

When the animated movie Nimona arrives on Netflix on June 30, fans of the original webcomic Nimona and the graphic novel that collects it will immediately notice massive changes to the story. The style of humor has changed radically, even with some of the specific gags preserved. The movie’s retro-futurist world — a blend of sci-fi technology and medieval culture — is somewhat like the book’s, but it has much more structure and history, with more emphasis on the ruling class. The second protagonist, whose name has changed tellingly from Ballister Blackheart to Ballister Boldheart, is a much softer and more helpless character in the movie, and his story is massively different.

At a press day leading up to Nimona’s release, writer-artist ND Stevenson explained that all those changes felt necessary, but that none of them mattered as much as preserving the title character as she was originally written.

“In the adaptation, I knew that things were going to change,” Stevenson said in a presentation livestreamed for select press outlets. “But it was always really important to me that Nimona herself remain the center of this story, and that the things that made her were not removed or sanded down or simplified too much.”

Nimona, a mysterious shape-changer who arrives at Ballister’s secret fortress and demands to be his sidekick after he’s framed as a villain, is the heart of both the book and the movie versions of the story. While she gets a much clearer backstory in the movie, she’s still the most recognizable character from the book, both in terms of her looks and her personality.

“One thing that I think is really important about this story for me — and it was really important to see in the movie — was the darkness at the heart