Producers Karen Ryan and Julie Zackary discuss their long road bringing the animated feature to a wide audience—and the Oscars.
Cinema’s annual awards race comes to a close this weekend during the Academy Awards, and there’s no other story like Nimona’s journey to becoming a nominee in the Best Animated Feature category. Producers Karen Ryan and Julie Zackary sat down with io9 to tell this remarkable tale of second chances. After Nimona’s original studio, Blue Sky, was closed during the Fox-Disney merger, the project found a new home at Annapurna Animation and Netflix, defying all odds.
We had called bankers. We had basically picked up the phone to anybody who would listen, shared the reels, and said, “How do we do this?” Nobody knew what we were doing—there was no playbook to follow. We, just on the strength of the reels and really our audacity to really have the nerve to think that we could do this, found a way. When we had come across Annapurna and Megan Ellison, she immediately connected with the reel, said, “I needed this movie when I was younger.