Most of the current crop of movies, good or bad, depend on special effects for their magic. Once it grows up, the present generation of young moviegoers will have developed a nostalgia for technology -- lasers, levitations, transformations of various and remarkable kinds. Because of this, a delicately etched, old-fashioned movie such as The Secret of Nimh seems reassuring and somewhat refreshing right now; it connects to the past.
The characters in Nimh -- mice with big, sad eyes, dapper rats, a wonderfully klutzy crow -- don't move with the technological tentativeness of a C3PO or an E.T.; they scamper or flap about with an oldtime effervescence. The story revolves around the efforts of a very sweet, widowed mouse to move her house in the farmer's field before the tractor squashes it and her child. A courageous little creature, she travels to the Wise Owl, who refers her to the highly sophisticated rats who live under the farmer's rosebush. While some considerable suspense is generated, we meet an array of characters that springs to life in glorious Crayola color: a bossy aunt-mouse, an insatiably carnivorous cat and the various rats.
The rats are by far the most interesting. Having been caged in labs where they were subjected to injections, they have begun to take on aspects of human intelligence. The "secret" blends supensefully with the widow's plight as the movie effectively dovetails toward its conclusion. For older children, The Secret of Nimh bypasses the state of the art on its way to the more satisfying state of the heart.