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 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.

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.

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.'