I Kill Giants preserves the emotion and mystery of the graphic novel it adapts
Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the Toronto International Film Festival.
In 2009, comics writer Joe Kelly and artist J.M. Ken Niimura produced one of the year’s best graphic novels: I Kill Giants, the action-packed story of a defiant, troubled 5th grader obsessed with her private war against giants. Kelly plays it coy with his readers throughout the book: Barbara Thorson’s classmates see her as weird and obnoxious, while school officials consider her imaginative and troubled at best, and dangerously disturbed at worst. No one considers the possibility that she’s actually facing down giants — because giants don’t exist.
Kelly…
