The Secret of NIMH: The rats used for intelligence experiments at the National Insitute of Mental Health have gotten so smart they're plotting an escape...
The Secret of NIMH: a full-length cartoon feature by a group of brilliant animators who believe they're inaugurating the Second Age of Animation.
To do it they've chosen a highly entertaining story based on Robert O'Brien's Newbery Award-winning children's book, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (in the film Mrs. Frisby becomes Mrs. Brisby for some reason. Maybe it's just one of those "B" movies?)
It is hard for us humans to imagine appealing rats--rats endowed with intelligence and a morality that surpasses our own. It's a concept that kids are more likely to grasp, but once the generation that shed body-wracking sobs for Bambi and Uncle Remus loosens up, they'll probably enjoy seeing truth, beauty and moral superiority manifested in rats who grow smart at the expense of the federal government.
The Pentagon, yes. The IRS, definitely. But the National Institute of Mental Health? Seems the least likely target for rats, until you think about it. Those rats get a lousy deal.
But run enough mazes and you start learning the ins and outs. The vivid animation persuades us that the most wretched of the animal kingdom can plot in their cages in the bowels of government bureaucracy to achieve greater heights than humans.
That's the big leap. Once rats are seen as role models, it's a simple trick for us to study their behavior and that of the other creatures who have something to say about truth and justice.
NIMH's main action takes place on Farmer Fitzgibbon's farm and is described through the eyes and exploits of the creatures who live on, under and over his fields: the precocious rats from NIMH; Mrs. Brisby (voice: Elizabeth Hartman), a widowed fieldmouse with four children; Jeremy the Crow (voice: Dom DeLuise), a comic klutz who sees himself as a dashing hero; and the Great Owl (voice: John Carradine), a natural predator overcome by pity for Mrs. Brisby, who is struggling to save her home. Learning that she is the widow of Jonathan Brisby, special friend of the rats from NIMH days, he commands her to "go to the rats."
Deciding that the Great Owl's advice is better than staying put and going under the farmer's plow, Mrs. Brisby seeks out the rats and learns of their achievements--they've built a community beneath the farmer's rosebush complete with electricity and water and social values to put Camelot to shame. Their society may be a cut above our civilization, but they have some familiar human types: Nicodemus the politician (voice: Derek Jacobi), wise and venerable leader; Justin, his protege and heir-apparent (voice: Peter Strauss); and because even this community is not without malcontents, there is Jenner, a real reactionary rat, who leads a faction that doesn't want to take the next evolutionary step--namely, leaving the farm to form a self-sufficient community free from the traditional necessity for rats to scavenge and steal.
Mrs. Brisby is inspired by her ferocious protective instincts towards her family and generally deserves all the support she gets from her friends. The various heroes and heroines manage to save a few lives as the story unfolds. There are lessons to be learned from them all, but the greatest of these is the admonition to help one another. In the act of saving someone else, character after character saves itself. Are any parents out there listening?
It's easy to see why Bluth Productions liked the storyline. To bring it to life on-screen, they've drawn on their own creative abilities to the fullest.
And they've drawn on a lot more--namely paper, canvas and celluloid--to produce the 150,000 frames that make up the film. Don Bluth and his fellow producers, Gary Goldman and John Pomery [sic], made hundreds of rough sketches for storyboards. Bluth's are among the most sophisticated in the business. Done in color markers, they are more precise than the quick pencil sketches used at other studios.
The backgrounds, over 1,000 of them in meticulous detail, were painted from color sketches. At points of high action, the colors tend to oranges or reds, at softer moments, toward cooler colors such as blues and greens. Over 600 colors were orchestrated to produce the proper tone and emotional impact for each scene.
The movie was filmed four times, each time in more precise detail: in story sketch, in rough pencil test, in cleaned-up pencil test, and in color with color backgrounds. And all this work shows--or rather, doesn't show, because it's easy to forget that the animals in the movie aren't real.
This is no cat-and-mouse caper that gets all fuzzed up as the fur flies. The process of xerography (lines transferred to celluloid electromagnetically) preserves the smooth color lines of the characters and the attention to detail in each frame--a complete work of art in itself.
Bluth's cameras operated on various levels, or planes, to add depth and dimension to scenes. Some of his effects were achieved by putting the same footage through the camera several times or by adding separate levels of painted cels to the painted backgrounds. It is estimated that The Secret of NIMH required 1,500,000 drawings.
Don Bluth is a soft-spoken but intense man inspired by a vision of what animation can be at its best. He created a studio in his garage while he was still with Walt Disney Productions, before he led a mass resignation from the studio in 1979. In the early years, his artists moonlighted for him to produce their first 30-minute animated film, Banjo and the Woodpile [sic], which took five and a half years to complete.
That got Bluth and company out of the garage and into an office in Studio City, California, where they completed a two-minute animated sequence to "Don't Walk Away," a love song performed by the Electric Light Orchestra in the film Xanadu. Their work sold United Artists on a 30-month production schedule and the 6,000 feet of film that is The Secret of NIMH.
Come to think of it, the born-again rat isn't all that far afield from an old-time mouse named Mickey, quite a good guy in his own day, and in his own way.