Walt Disney was not the first man in the animation game. In 1831, Joseph Plateau invented the phenakistoscope, a device consisting of two discs. The bottom one had action drawings painted on it, the top one had slits in it. When both were rotated, the illusion of motion was born. In 1891, Thomas Edison devised the kinetoscope and the motion picture was born. "Alice in Cartoonland" made her bow in 1923, Walt Disney's combination of live-action and animation.
Now comes Don Bluth, a former Mormon missionary in Argentina and a break-away artist from the Disney studios. His new mission is to lead the Second Golden Age of Animation. For a starter, Don Bluth Productions will present "The Secret of NIMH," based on the Newbery Award-winning book, "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH" by Robert C. O'Brien. In the $6 million animated feature, opening this week at the Stonestown, the name of Mrs. Frisby has been changed to Mrs. Brisby, but she's still a widowed mouse seeing the help of some mysterious rats to save her family from being plowed under. The mystery rats are a super-intelligent pack. They've been the subjects of an experment at the National Institute of Mental Health. With their new abilities, they have built an underground civilization and are planning to become entirely self-sufficient and not steal a thing.
Among the voices will be Elizabeth Hartman as Mrs. Brisby, Hermione Baddeley as Auntie Shrew, John Carradine as Great Owl, Paul Shenar as the dastardly Jenner and Derek Jacobi, as Nicodemus, leader of the rats.
What will make this the Second Golden Age of Animation? Well, the film features many animation methods discarded or ignored by other studios as being too expensive. These include multiplane camera shots and multiple passes of the film through the camera to add depth and dimension to scenes; characters' shadows, reflections and other special effects, the orchestration of color--more than 600 are used--and there will also be more than 1000 backgrounds. It took 1.5 million drawings to complete the film.