Don Bluth and several of his colleagues departed the Disney Studios animation unit in a huff several years ago, over, as far as Bluth was concerned, the issue of creative integrity. Bluth is a purist, and his former employer, he claimed, had begun to take shortcuts with a painstaking and expensive art form.
He was going to make his own animated feature, and in the lush, detail rich tradition which had made Disney great. There would be no shortcuts, no scrimping; the film would be vowed, classical animation worthy of Disney in its golden days.
In The Secret of NIMH, he has succeeded, and so beautifully that even when the story drags every now and then, it's still so visually mesmerizing the strengths of the art far outweigh the weaknesses in narrative.
Taken from Robert C. O'Brien's award-winning children's story Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, the film tells the story of a widowed field mouse who must move her concrete-block home without endangering the life of her youngest child, who has pneumonia and can't be moved. On the advice of a formidable owl, she goes to a group of rats for help.
But these are no ordinary rats; they've all escaped from a laboratory at the National Institute for Mental Health, after having been made humanly intelligent through a variety of experiments. In a situation recalling George Orwell's Animal Farm, however, their little civilization is a cross-section of temperaments. There's Nicodemus, the sage; Justin, the bright young leader; and Jenner, the greedy, egomaniacal turncoat.
These elements fall together rather quickly, with the predictably happy outcome visible almost right away, but the visual depth keeps the story interesting. Its one major drawback, in fact, is that there are times it becomes necessarily talky, but not quite simply enough for a child to follow without unchildlike concentration. At the same time, though, that's one of its hidden benefits; long on classical tradition in the art form, it's refreshingly short on the mushy moralizing which found its way into lesser Disney works.
The characterizations aren't quite as strong as they might have been, but I sense that has more to do with the nature of the form rather than outright negligence. Full animation requires so much piecework -- thousands of drawings for every few feet of film -- that a certain economy is mandatory. Still, The Secret of NIMH is far superior to Disney's The Fox and the Hound from last year, which itself was far superior to the trash which collects on TV sets on Saturday mornings.
There's a lesson to be learned here, I think, that kids are much smarter than we think they are, but in need of a certain guidance. Disney and Warner Bros. got me hooked on animation to the point wehre the static junk -- Chuck Jones, the creator of the Road Runner and Pepe LePew, calls it "talking radio" -- made for TV since 1962 makes me ill. But that same trash is what kids are now growing up on; those dreadfully cute Smurfs ("London Bridge came smurfing down?" As Drew Barrymore might say, give me a break.), the lumpish Scooby-Doo, the bowlderization of Star Trek, even Bill Cosby's well-intentioned teaching in Fat Albert.
Real animation is never without wonder, which is why it lends itself so easily to fantasy. In his own way, Ralph Bakshi (Fritz the Cat, Heavy Traffic, American Pop) is trying to break the mold, and deserves credit for it.
But Bluth and his colleagues, in their way, are trying to restore it, to scrape off the rust of cliches and bang out the dents caused by too much cuteness without sufficient intelligence. The Secret of NIMH, I hope, is only a beginning.