Film Nerds
Writer/artist: Sofia Warren
Putnam; $13.99
Publisher’s rating: Gr 3-7
Starting middle school brings big changes to Ami’s life, and all of them seem to be pretty bad ones. For the first time since kindergarten, she’s separated from her best friend Ivy and all of the other friends they share. Suddenly isolated, she realizes how hard it is to make new friends, she’s suddenly aware of the social hierarchy in which some classmates are cool and others are not, and she’s started blushing uncontrollably, earning the unwelcome nickname “Tomato.”
Ami is the protagonist of cartoonist Sofia Warren’s first graphic novel for kids, Film Nerds. Ami is, of course, one of the nerds of the title, and Ivy is the other. The pair spend much of their free time together working on a science-fiction epic, Rovers of Time and Space, and now that they never see one another during the school day, working on their movie is pretty much the only time they get to see each other.
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They love making the movie for different reasons, but doing so gives both of them the opportunity to relax and be their true selves, completely free of the judgement they fear from their classmates (and, whether they realize it or not, subject themselves to). After school starts, Ami particularly likes it because it gives her a chance to hang out with Ivy without having to talk about how school is going. That’s because it’s going so badly, that she fears if Ivy ever finds out how unpopular Ami actually is, she will stop wanting to be her friend at all.
Much of the book follows Ami’s attempts to grapple with her new social reality, her challenges made all the more difficult because she refuses to tell anyone else how it’s actually going and how she really feels. The movie eventually plays a big role in the conflict when a sixth-grade talent show is announced.
Ami wants to enter the movie, which she thinks will show the whole school that there’s so much more to her than a quiet teacher’s pet who is always turning red. Ivy refuses though, as she’s too embarrassed to be seen by the whole school—and her crush—acting the way she does when it’s only her and Ami.
The book, broken into a dozen chapters, frequently shares bits of Rovers with the readers. After the main action in each chapter, several pages are devoted to showing scenes from the movie, each two-page spread broken into four tiers of panels, the art appearing on strips of film (although the kids are actually recording their movie on a smartphone, rather than film) and the dialogue appearing just below each panel/film still in the format of a movie script.
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The story of the movie, which involves the last survivors of Earth stranded on a spaceship and planning to try to go back in time to save the world, reflects the events of Ami and Ivy’s lives, but not so directly as to be obvious. Among the jokes and homemade special effects, their movie deals with issues of trust and honesty among friends.
Warren’s background in cartooning is obvious in her art here. For the most part, she works in a medium shot, as if her characters were on the set of a TV show, and though their designs are all quite distinct, they are quite loosely rendered, each seeming to be half doodle.
Ami narrates, and in that narration explains some of the most difficult aspects of the book—like an emotional “static” that descends on her during her lowest point, which Warren draws as a cloud of dots obscuring Ami’s head—but the majority of the story unfolds via the dialogue, this in obviously hand-drawn balloons with handwriting-like lettering. The art therefore has a warm, intimate feeling to it, being clearly the work of human hands, rather than something machine assisted.
Though often quite sad, the types of problems Ami faces in Film Nerds are familiar, even common ones for kids her age, and there is something rewarding in watching her face and ultimately overcoming them. Warren’s book also makes a strong argument for not just being yourself, but also being honest about your needs and feelings, which is no doubt an important lesson for middle-schoolers to learn…and us older readers to get the occasional reminder of.
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