This movie season is packed with animated spectacles, but perhaps the most successful is the least-heralded “Nimona,” a fractured fairy tale that almost didn’t get made.

Apt, that, since this Netflix release — which starts a theatrical run at Landmark’s Opera Plaza on Friday, June 23, before hitting the streaming service a week later — is all about outsiders’ struggle to be seen for the amazing individuals that they are.

Directed by the “Spies in Disguise”尼克•布鲁诺和特洛伊Quane的团队adapted from ND Stevenson’s acclaimed web comic/graphic novel, the movie is a raucous punk comedy set in a futuristic kingdom still mired in its medieval roots. Though often looking like a bent, 2-D princess cartoon, this computer-animated riot subverts numerous conventions. Its title hero seeks to tear down thousand-year-old institutions and the close-minded attitudes society views life through.

Nimona is a teenage shape-shifter with a Johnny Rotten fashion sense and Bugs Bunny mouth, with quicksilver facial expressions and a rapid-fire dialogue track that may be the best thing Chloë Grace Moretz (“Carrie,” “Kick Ass”)所做的。Nimona不能被固定下来he morphs into a pink rhino or dancing shark, nor can she be stopped when she sprouts demon wings and sinks her fangs into wrecking whatever she can. Yet there’s a deep hurt at the core of this gleefully destructive character, which is judiciously hinted at on the way to a stirring, climactic payoff.

“Nimona” may not be the most elaborate animated feature of the year, but some of its images are among the most heartbreaking and resonant of 2023. Not bad for a movie packed with gags and action.

Nimona’s reluctant partner in crime is Ballister Boldheart (voiced byRiz Ahmed). A rarity in this neon-splattered kingdom that has been walled off from the terror-infested outside world for a millennium, Ballister was a street kid who worked his way up through an elite knight-training program. Several aristocratic classmates put him down, but Ambrosius Goldenloin (digital creator Eugene Lee Yang), a descendant of the kingdom’s monster-fighting founder, became Ballister’s supportive lover.

But while Ballister and Ambrosius could be the main focus of other films, class conflict and gay romance are just elements of “Nimona’s” larger story.

An assassination at a big, televised knight-dubbing ceremony is blamed on Ballister. Soon his mug shot is on giant video monitors attached to the city-state’s half-timbered walls (the look here is a cross between “Blade Runner” and “Cinderella” in Times Square, often washed in psychologically loaded pink light) and Nimona reckons this means Ballister is an excellent villain. She invades his hideout and offers her sidekick services to the traumatized knight, proposing all kinds of evil mayhem they could commit together. He’s appalled but soon realizes that Nimona’s shape-shifting abilities can help him unmask the real killer.

After several scrapes and escapes, Ballister even finds Nimona’s obnoxious personality a bit endearing. But he still keeps asking “uptight knight small-minded questions,” as Nimona calls them, about who and what she is, never just accepting her default answer: “I’m Nimona.” This crisis of trust, one of several that reverberates through the film, becomes pointed as a spear that threatens the two and all they know.

If you haven’t guessed, this is an outstanding trans parable. Nimona has been called a monster all her life, sometimes internalizing that to her own and others’ peril, and the born-disadvantaged Ballister can’t easily overcome his own prejudices to be the ally she needs. Amid scattershot pop culture references, flying cars and squads of armored knights with laser-guided crossbows, “Nimona” makes a cry for acceptance that has mythic resonance.

Initially developed at Fox’s now-defunct Blue Sky animation subsidiary, “Nimona” was delayed after Disney took over the studio, then by the pandemic, and ultimately canceled by the Mouse House. But Silicon Valley scion Megan Ellison’s independent production company, Annapurna Pictures, picked up and completed the half-finished project and got Netflix to distribute.

Now “Nimona” is out as political demonization of the LGBTQ community is at a fever pitch — though this bold and thoughtful work has the earmarks of a classic, regardless of when it got released. That it’s so entertaining and unapologetic at this moment in history adds another component to the film’s kaleidoscope of qualities.

Indeed, “Nimona” feels genuinely necessary.

Bob Strauss is a freelance writer.