On September 13, 1979, an event of far-reaching influence occurred at the Disney animation studios. Following nearly a decade of training under several animation pioneers who led the studio to world recognition, three of its top animators, Don Bluth, Gary Goldman and John Pomeroy, resigned from the department in a dispute over creative quality. They and fourteen other former Disney artists set up shop in Bluth's garage, completing work on what had been a thirty-minute training film Banjo the Woodpile Cat. The group's ambition was to reinstate the classical animation procedures used by Walt Disney in his early features, techniques now abandoned and thought too costly for present-day production.
Ironically, the three producers first learned of Robert C. O'Brien's Newbery Award-winning novel, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (1971), from a storyman at the Disney studio. There, they tried to cultivate interest in the project, but the studio's conservative production stance following Walt Disney's death made any such attempts unsuccessful. After their departure, the three obtained rights to the book with Aurora. In January, 1980, work on the ambitious project began.
The Secret of NIMH is a delightful family picture. It begins with a cryptic prophecy made by an aged rat called Nicodemus (voice by Derek Jacobi), the venerable leader of the rats of NIMH (the acronym of a research institute never explicitly identified, although the letters suggest "National Institute of Mental Health"). The old wizard's chamber is a credit to the special-effects artists' handling of mood changes via colors and shading in the background. Special-effects animation is defined as anything which moves on screen and is not a character. For example, when Nicodemus predicts or attemtps to shape the future with his pulsating hologram, the sparkly laser-like dust burns his words into the parchment of the "Great Book." The added special effects make the fire the hottest element in the scene.
After the main credits, a cute female mouse seeks help from a crotchety old pharmacist mouse named Mr. Ages (voice of Arthur Malet), who resides inside a rusty threshing machine. This is Mrs. Brisby (voice of Elizabeth Hartman), a widowed mother of four who needs medicine for her ailing youngest son, Timmy. (The character name was changed from the novel's Frisby to Brisby following anticipated merchandising problems with the Hasbro Toy Company, which markets the popular Frisbee. This occurred after voices were fixed, so every scene with a characer speaking the name "Mrs. Frisby" had to be reedited and dubbed with the prefix "Bri.")
Mrs. Brisby and her family live inside a half-buried cinder block at the edge of Farmer Fitzgibbon's fallow field. Seeding is imminent, and the farmer's plow will uproot their home and force them to move. Normally this move is merely an expected seasonal inconvenience, but this time young Timmy is confined to bed with pneumonia, and a forced trip could be fatal.
Returning home, Mrs. Brisby helps a clumsy crow named Jeremy (his voice excellently supplied by Dom DeLuise) out of a tangled mess which he has made while collecting string for a nest. Jeremy is searching for "Miss Right," but unfortunately does everything wrong in classic slapstick, accident-prone style. While exchanging introductions, Mrs. Brisby and Jeremy nearly succumb to the jaws of Dragon, the farmer's cat, who creeps up on them from inside a hollow log. The chase sequence which follows is superbly animated. During the chase, Mrs. Brisby loses the medicine. Jeremy offers to give Mrs. Brisby a lift home, but the shaken mouse prefers to rely on her own four legs.
Meanwhile, back at home, busy body neighbor Auntie Shrew (voice of Hermione Baddeley) has her hands full with the four impetuous youngsters. She is about to leave in disgust when Mrs. Brisby walks through the door. A saccharine melody, written and sung by Paul Williams, accompanies her putting the mice to bed; this is perhaps the only boring sequence in the movie. Later that night, a group of ugly rats scurry into the great thornbush in front of the Fitzgibbon's house. Mysterious lights glow inside the bush as an off-screen human voice inside the house tells of a peculiar disease that may be infecting the rats.
The next day, the mice are awakened by the horrendous roar of a tractor. The farmers have decided to seed the field early. Mrs. Brisby and Auntie Shrew manage to stop the tractor only seconds before it reaches their home. The driver notices the fuel line has been cut and decided to return the following day to finish the job.
A terrified Mrs. Brisby flies on Jeremy's back to seek help from the Great Owl (voice of John Carradine). The setting of his dank lair lair recalls the mystery of Malefocent's castle in Disney's Sleeping Beauty (1958). The similarity is not without significance: Sleeping Beauty was the first animation assignment given to Bluth, in 1956. The brilliant evocation of mood and ambience in the shadows and changes in lighting when Mrs. Brisby ventures bravely into the Owl's chamber gives evidence of the kind of attention to detail lacking in most modern-day animation. Such subtle effects are at work throughout the film: when a character's feelings are bright and cheerful, oranges and reds dominate the color scheme; when action subsides, blues and greens prevail.
The formidable Owl makes a dramatic appearance, saving Mrs. Brisby from a prowling spider. With gleaming eyes he demands to know the meaning of her intrusion. She explains her family's plight and is about to be thrown out when she speaks the name of her departed husband, Jonathan Brisby. To her surprise, the Owl knows of Jonathan; indeed, there is a curious hint of respect when he mentions Jonathan's name. He tells her to ask Nicodemus and the rats of NIMH for assistance in moving her home.
Mrs. Brisby hesitates outside the farmer's rosebush, summoning her resolve to enter the rats' mysterious underground civilization. She is about to proceed when Jeremy startles her, stupidly disguised in a baby's outfit. Mrs. Brisby does not want the clumsy Jeremy underfoot and manages to talk him into returning home and keeping a watchful eye on her young ones. Unfortunately, the crow still gets into trouble and is tied up by Auntie Shrew for trespassing. Despite hilarious efforts to unravel himself, Jeremy is unable to convince the young mice of their mother's quest and his own friendliness.
The rat's underworld is a strange mix of the worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien and Hieronymus Bosch. Weird sparking lights glisten off hidden underground streams from a neighboring mill. Mrs. Brisby is soon discovered by a burly rat guard, who chases her with an elecrically charged quarterstaff. While eluding him, she bumps into Mr. Ages. The old mouse is astonished that she survived her visit to the Great Owl's lair and promptly takes her to see Nicodemus.
Along the way, another rat guard follows them. The rat is about to run them in when Ages discovers it is only Justin (voice of Peter Strauss), Captain of the Guard and follower of Nicodemus. Justin opts to escort them personally when he learns that Mrs. Brisby is the widowed wife of Jonathan.
Inside the great hall, the rat leaders are having another heated meeting. They debate whether to follow Nicodemus' advice -- uprooting their kingdom and moving to Thornwall -- or to stay right where they are. Advocates of the plan feel it is wrong to steal electricity from the farmer's household, the means by which the rats of NIMH derive their secret power. Opponents of the move are led by Jenner (voice of Paul Shenar), an evil rat who tried to kindle rebellion within the pack. He hates Nicodemus and, above all, Justin, the one among them destined to inherit leadership of the rats. Jenner sees an opportunity in pretending to help Mrs. Brisby. At the right moment, he plans to sever the cinderblock pulley, crushing and thereby dethroning Nicodemus.
Mrs. Brisby finally meets the old leader, who tells her of the rats' origins and her husband's great deed. It seems that Farmer Fitzgibbon's field is located near a mysterious research institute known to the animals only as "NIMH." Experimental injections given to a strain of rats and mice resulted in human-like intelligence, including the ability to read, enabling them to escape from their cages. All but two of the mice perished in the strong vacuum suction of the ventilation system. It was Jonathan and Mr. Ages who eventually helped the heavier rats excape from the shaft, biting through the screen over the final exit. This explains the rats' superior knowledge of electricity, and the ability of Mrs. Brisby's offspring to read.
The film's opening cryptic message is now made clear. Fate and a little bit of good old-fashioned wizardry have led Mrs. Brisby to the rats. To reward Jonathan's bravery and Mrs. Brisby's unselfishness, Nidodemus bestows a golden amulet upon her, explaining that a fire within the amulet will glow when someone brave of heart calls upon its hidden powers. Mrs. Brisby learns that Jonathon lost his life while drugging the cat, Dragon, for the rats. In pure fairy-tale fashion, Nicodemus now calls upon her to do the same for her children, for only with Dragon asleep can the entire rat population move her house undisturbed. Mrs. Brisby bravely accepts the challenge.
Through a tiny hole in the floorboards large enough only for a mouse, Mrs. Brisby creeps into the kitchen. After sprinkling powder in the cat's saucer and nearly becoming cat food herself, she is caught and made a pet by the farmer's little girl. From her parakeet-cage prison, she overhears the farmer talking to someone at the NIMH laboratory; the farmer requests that the rosebush be uprooted and the rats destroyed. What follows are some stunningly realistic rotoscoped sequences (animation traced from real-life footage) picturing the cage bouncing up and down on its wire hanger as Mrs. Brisby tried to open the latch. She finally escapes by cleverly pushing her water trough onto the kitchen floor.
At the moving site, the rats have rigged an intricate system of pulleys, using the turning mill as support; the three-dimensional classic animation recalls the elaborateness of Dave Fleischer's Gulliver's Travels (1939). When the cinderblock is directly over Nicodemus, Jenner's henchman refuses to cut the line, and Jenner takes it upon himself to sever the cord, stabbing his henchman in the process. The house falls in a mud pond, crushing Nidodemus.
Mrs. Brisby arrives on the scene, warning the others of the coming NIMH trucks. Jenner tries to kill her too, but is prevented by Justin. After a well staged swordfight, Jenner is killed with a knife by his own dying henchman. Meanwhile, however, the cinderblock has begun to sink in the mud pit, with Auntie Shrew and the young ones trapped inside. The rats rig a makeshift pulley system, but this fails. Mrs. Brisby frantically pulls on the block as she and her home disappear into the muck. When all is thought lost, the prophecy of Nicodemus is spoken in voice-over, and the amulet releases its golden power. The block is raised magically out of the swamp, and Mrs. Brisby and her family are saved.
The following beautiful spring day brings with it the arrival of Jeremy, tugging a bag full of string behind him. Late as usual, he wonders what is to be done with all the string. Predictably, a female crow (likewise clumsy) gets tangled in the mess, and it soon becomes evident that he has finally found Miss Right. The rats of NIMH have made it to the safety of Thornwall, where electicity can be borrowed from nature, and Mrs. Brisby and her brood can live happily ever after.
From an animator's point of view, The Secret of NIMH is a dream come true. The rich, fluid tendencies of classical animation have not been demonstrated so well since Walt Disney's The Jungle Book (1967). The two-and-a-half-year production employed many methods discarded by modern animation studios, including multiplane camera techniques and multiple passes of the film through the camera to add depth and dimension to scenes; characters' shadows, reflections and other special- effects phenomena; and the orchestration of color throughout the film to achieve emotional impact.
In classically animated shots, since film travels twenty-four frames per second, twenty-four drawings of each character or effect must be executed for camera dollies and pans. For stationary camera shots, twelve drawings are used, or one for every two frames of film. Because characters and effects are always drawn on separate pieces of transparent animation celluloid, some shots in The Secret of NIMH required as many as sixteen drawings for a single second of film. The total number of drawings in the finalized film amounted to more than 1,500,000.
Bluth used two custom-built electronically operated multiplane cameras on The Secret of NIMH to create startling depth between foreground and background objects. A tracking camera about eight feet off the floor was shot downward through several clear plates of glass upon which artwork was placed. These were set at various levels to get the proper atmospheric haze, moving parallax perspective and depth of field between near and distant objects viewed on regular live-action features.
Simply speaking, it is as though an artist painted a landscape portrait on several panes of glass. The farthest piece from the viewer contains the mountains and clouds, the next the tree, the next a car, and on the closest plate of glass, a person. The car can now pass behind the person, and if a forward camera dolly is executed, both the car and person will disappear offscreen faster than the trees and mountains.
Multiplane passes of the same bit of unexposed film through the camera were also used throughout. This enabled radiant glow effects, such as those associated with the amulet and underground lights, to be "burned" into a normal scene. As many as twelve different passes of special-effects cels involving the swords and golden amulet were made.
The film's exquisite background drawings should also be acknowledged. Since backgrounds do not usually change in perspective during conventional camera pans or tilts, it is unfortunate that so few present-day cartoons have beautifully rendered background artwork; perhaps producers are worried about upstaging their flat, limited-animation foreground subjects. In The Secret of NIMH, by contrast, meticulously detailed, colorful settings were always chosen. There were more than one thousand fully detailed backgrounds in the film, and more than six hundred color variations at work within them, nearly five hundred of which were developed by Don Bluth's studio.
The painstaking attention to detail was, unfortunately, lost on the public. Due to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's acquisition of United Artists' debts, and its selective push of three simultaneous summer blockbusters, The Secret of NIMH got lost in the shuffle and received little publicity. Reportedly, balloons were given to magazine and newspaper editors instead of screenings and art material. Having never released a full-length animated feature before, M-G-M treated the film as if it were one of their Tom and Jerry pre-feature shorts. Although The Secret of NIMH is available for tape rental and to cable television audiences, Bluth is planning a proper rerelease presentation of his finely crafted first feature which may bring it to the attention of a wider audience.