The Secret Of Nimh (Animated) (DVD)

...first animated feature since leaving the sleazy corporate tyranny of Disney behind, remains one of the most accomplished and critically acclaimed in the history of cartoon cinema, and easily upstages all of his company's subsequent productions despite the greater box office success of 'An American Tail' and 'The Land Before Time.' It was produced by Bluth's dedicated, overworked team over the course of thirty gruelling months from 1979 to 1982 as ...
...on their laurels and lacked the excitement and magic of the company's distant golden era. 'The Secret of NIMH' was created specifically to return to older, more intricate styles of animation while conversely continuing to push the format to greater extremes and innovations, and the result, while perhaps not a timeless masterpiece due to its position so far down the line, seems to have been unanimously praised as a success.

The film ... more

Don Bluth's first animated feature since leaving the sleazy corporate tyranny of Disney behind, remains one of the most accomplished and critically acclaimed in the history of cartoon cinema, and easily upstages all of his company's subsequent productions despite the greater box office success of 'An American Tail' and 'The Land Before Time.' It was produced by Bluth's dedicated, overworked team over the course of thirty gruelling months from 1979 to 1982 as a direct rival to Disney's continuing productions, which Bluth felt were cruising comfortably along on their laurels and lacked the excitement and magic of the company's distant golden era. 'The Secret of NIMH' was created specifically to return to older, more intricate styles of animation while conversely continuing to push the format to greater extremes and innovations, and the result, while perhaps not a timeless masterpiece due to its position so far down the line, seems to have been unanimously praised as a success.

The film is adapted from Robert C. O'Brien's award-winning children's novel 'Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH' with a few customary alterations for the screen (including changing the lead character's name to the less easily mocked Mrs. Brisby), after Disney elected not to produce the same adaptation earlier in the seventies. O'Brien's story seems tailor-made to have its rights licensed out to an animation company, with its noble rodent characters, shoehorned magical overtones and marginal, annoying child characters, and the resulting script produced by Bluth and four others clearly takes its cues from the Disney tradition, thus reluctantly mirroring the company's contemporary productions - indeed, the character of Jeremy the crow, who has no real relevance to the story as it progresses apart from offering clumsy comic relief, seems fairly similar to that seagull in Disney's later success 'The Little Mermaid.' Though as you can probably tell, my long-standing hatred of Disney means I'm not familiar enough with the latter film to take this comparison any further (and even if I did like Disney, that was a girl's film anyway; sword-fighting rats is what boys like).

The story is quite interesting, and inevitably comparable to other children's novel-turned-animations 'The Animals of Farthing Wood' and 'Watership Down' in its tale of small animals struggling to adapt and survive in a world controlled by humans (and populated with the occasional predator), but it has enough original ideas of its own to stand strong and apart. Taking place entirely on a large patch of farmland, the main characters are a mix of rodents - common field mice and the more secretive and elusive rats, while featuring a couple of birds and an adversarial cat that strangely lacks the intellect and speech ability of the smaller creatures. It's great to see how the rodents have adapted the waste of human industry to form their homes and gadgets out of abandoned machinery and hollowed concrete blocks among other things, and for once there's even an unspoken arrangement of sorts between the relatively innocent farmer and the creatures of the field; although the farmer has some issues with the rats that will be explained shortly, he seems to have no problem with the other wildlife inhabiting his fields, but doesn't let its presence interfere with his farming duties. The rodents and small mammals, by consequence, are intelligent enough to have learned his farming practices, and prepare for a mass exodus each time the tractor is due to be pulled from its mothballs to plough over their homes.

What evolves into the main 'plot' of the film actually arrives rather late, and is an interesting and obviously critical exploration of scientific animal testing. The widowed Mrs. Brisby learns from the strangely advanced rats, developing their own industrial civilisation beneath the farmer's rose bush, that her late husband was one of many rodents plucked from the streets by a human organisation known as NIMH, the United States' National Institute of Mental Health, and injected with chemicals that somehow increased their intelligence to the point that they were able to lead a mass jailbreak. Now, NIMH appears to have received word of the farmer's tales of rats in his fields being able to avoid traps and are arriving to investigate, causing the rodents to join together in a journey to faraway safety, but they must also contend with rising political conflicts within their own ranks.

Perhaps the main drawback of this film is that the plot is very uneven, changing its focus every once in a while and subsequently having to rush some major elements towards a hasty conclusion in very little screen time. It initially seems to be a story entirely about the exodus of the field mice from the impending ploughing of the field, a journey complicated by the pneumonia of Mrs. Brisby's youngest son, but once Brisby begins her journey to the darker recesses of the wilderness and learns about her husband, these concerns are shifted to the background. This is relieving in a way, as it means viewers are spared a film that threatened to be based around Brisby's annoying juvenile son Martin (voiced by a prepubescent Wil Wheaton who would later star as the much-hated boy genius in 'Star Trek: The Next Generation'), but it also makes for a more episodic series of events that's a little unsatisfying. Coming off worst of all is the emergence of the evil rat opportunist Jenner, whose story is introduced and concluded far too late in the narrative to have any real impact, though it does make for a fittingly dark and violent dramatic climax, with the rain acting as textbook pathetic fallacy for any media students watching.

Of course, the most appealing and spectacular aspect of this film is its visual artistry, from the fluid animation that serves to define Bluth's style here before being replicated in all the productions that followed, to the incredible and lavish backgrounds. There is no element of laziness or haphazard production anywhere in this film's art, introducing spectacular touches such as the frequently used backlighting for magical and sunlight effects that would be ripped off in much animation hereafter. The rodents themselves are somewhat doomed to border on Disney-style caricatures, complete with illogical clothes that are even flatly stated to be impractical by characters in two scenes, but their design somehow manages to be distinctive enough to mark them out as 'trademark Don Bluth rodents,' paving the way for Feivel in the next feature, while also coming a few years before Disney's major rodent blowout in 'Basil the Great Mouse Detective' (oddly, the only Disney film I liked as a child. I must have a thing about animated mice, though only the more obscure ones obviously). I was content to spend most of the film gazing at the excellent painted backgrounds, from the beautiful sunrise and sunsets over the fields to the creepy owl's tree complete with cobwebs and terrifying tarantula. Not that I was scared by it though, I wasn't. I'm 22 after all, and it was clearly a coincidence that I accidentally knocked my drink over by accident when it appeared. I wasn't scared.

Laid over the top of this fantastic art is a fairly standard orchestral soundtrack from Jerry Goldsmith, responding logically to the fluctuating landscape and level of excitement and danger at any given time, but also repeating the main theme intermittently to the point of irritation, particularly when Paul Williams adds some terrible lyrics to it for the end credits. There's thankfully only one song incorporated into the film itself, which is great news for any Disney-haters like me who also happen to despise musicals, and this harks back once again to the early animated films of the mid-twentieth century in its lullaby-like female warble. Although this film was quite innovative on its release, I wouldn't be surprised if these nods to the old school serve to confound animation historians as to this film's age in a few centuries' time. The voice acting has some of the natural banter feel of Don Bluth's later projects, mainly due to the ever-present Dom DeLuise filling in as the comedy character, but is on the whole more traditional and less rife with the amusing, free-form banter that some of the company's later films achieved to great success, particularly the riffing between DeLuise and Burt Reynolds in the otherwise far inferior 'All Dogs Go to Heaven.' The presence of wise, mystical old figures such as Nicodemus the rat and the Great Owl allow for some great performances from crusty English actors such as Derek Jacobi, which adds a touch of class amidst the childish fantasy much as it did for George Lucas' original 'Star Wars.'

With its detailed production, independent credentials and sword-fighting rats, 'The Secret of NIMH' was destined to be a cult hit more than a box office blockbuster, but this attitude also makes it a little easy to fall into the trap of proclaiming it the best thing ever. The animation and design work are all miles ahead of anything Disney were doing around that time, especially as they mainly seemed to be focusing on live-action sci-fi like 'The Black Hole,' 'Tron' and 'Flight of the Navigator' before making their mermaid-based animation comeback at the end of the Eighties, but the plot is all a little too jumbled and uneven to stand up well to repeated viewings. The magical dues ex machina (I hope you media students are still taking notes) is far too convenient and doesn't really fit in with the earthy tone of the rest of the film, and characters are all too frequently dropped or ignored as the action comes to a head. I'd still recommend it as one of the finest animated films of the last couple of decades, certainly something that should please fans of Farthing Wood and Watership Down (though it's less graphic), but perhaps easily scoffed at by fans of Brian Jacques' 'Redwall' books, that I believe have something to do with rats fighting wars against each other or something. Alas, I'm too old to read them now.

Now that Disney is all but resigned to making tedious and repetitive computer-generated films and Don Bluth Films have been silent for the decade as Bluth concentrates on failed revivals of his brilliant 80s arcade games, it's time for another independent release with the spirit of 'NIMH' to make hand-drawn films fantastic again, and hopefully cutting out the songs while they're at it. The DVD has long been available as a budget release with only a promotional trailer tagged on, and is available from Amazon UK for a piffling £3.97. There was an inevitable straight-to-video sequel some years later that should be easy to avoid. 

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