The Secret of NIMH (opening today at the Imperial Theatre) cannot be accused of lacking indident: when the movie begins, Mrs. Brisby, a mouse who lives in Farmer Fitzgibbons' field, doesn't know what the initials NIMH stand for, but she does know the letters have something to do with the weird rats living under the farmer's rose garden.
The widow Brisby's son is sick and her home is threatened by the farmer's plow: action is mandatory. A wise old owl advises her to seek the assistance of the weird rats. When she does, she discovers they are engaged in an internal power struggle of Shakespearean sweep; she also discovers they have embarked on a war against humanity. More goes on in The Secret of NIMH than in the entire Rocky trilogy.
Directed by Disney Studios' renegade Don Bluth with the lavish attention to detail that characterized Uncle Walt's earlier animated work, The Secret of NIMH (the initials stand for National Institute of Mental Health, but no more will be told), is a bouncy, witty, pleasurably scary children's movie that adults will enjoy more than they may care to confess.
When he left Disney, Bluth took the best and drew with it -- the characters in The Secret of NIMH (based on the late Robert C. O'Brien's Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH) are cute without being cloying, and the picture earns its laughs, tears, thrills and chills. The well-known voices -- from Elizabeth Hartman, Dom De Luise, John Carradine, Hermione Baddeley and Peter Strauss -- act with a vigor that effortlessly enlivens the paper-and-pen protagonists.
Many writers dubbed NIMH "old-fashioned," presumably because it reminds them of Disney and because it does not contain space battles, bare breasts or lads in leather equipped with lasers.
Look at Bambi and The Secret of NIMH on the same day, however, and the latter's sophistication is readily apparent -- Star Wars has influenced Bluth, and so has television (the pace of NIMH is lickety-split), and so has the modern world (violence is used sparingly in NIMH, but it exists, and is not "cartoon" violence -- it hurts), and so has child psychology (the picture treats children as creatures that need to be provoked).
But for all that, the fantasy is as sweet as honeysuckle. During his Toronto visit this week, Bluth said: "I think naturalism in movies is veering back toward romanticism. Now that we know what the pill is, we want a little sugar to make the medicine go down."
NIMH's suger-to-pill ratio is perfect.