"The Secret of NIMH" is the promising but perplexing first production of Don Bluth Productions, a new company founded by disgruntled former Disney animators.
Bluth, the film's director, producer and co-writer, led the exodus from Disney three years ago, midway through production of "The Fox and the Hound." The animators' complaint was that creativity was stifled at the Disney studio, so "The Secret of NIMH" suggests the way they'd do a Disney cartoon if left to their own devices.
The result is technically superb, an imaginative piece of work that's very much in the Disney tradition. At $7 million, it also cost about half what Disney cartoons now cost. But it does tend to rush through narrative material that a Disney cartoon might have taken at a steadier pace, and it never quite succeeds in bringing together its two story threads.
The split nature of the plot is telegraphed in the title of the Robert C. O'Brien novel, "Mrs. Brisby and the Rats of NIMH," that inspired the script. Mrs. Brisby is a meek, widowed mouse with four children whose home is threatened by a farmer's plow. The rats of NIMH -- the meaning of the initials is O'Brien's big plot twist -- have received an artificial brain boost, and they use their new powers to help her.
The rats have been endowed accidentally with human intelligence, but the script avoids showing how this differs from the anthromorphized intelligence of Mrs. Brisby and the woods dwellers who help her. Cartoons always attribute human personalities to animals, so what makes the rats unique?
An answer to this question wouldn't simply fill a plot hole; it could carry the movie all by itself. The rats' super-intelligence -- the secret of NIMH -- is the most interesting aspect of the story, but it's a subplot to the heroine's comparatively predictable adventures.
For all its script problems and lack of focus, "The Secret of NIMH" nonetheless is a warm, engrossing film that should make up for the absence of a new Disney cartoon this summer.
The voices, especially John Carradine as an Ozlike owl, Elizabeth Hartman as Mrs. Brisby and Dom De Luise as a klutzy, romantic crow, are well-cast and the animators make full use of them to create drawings with character. Visually this is one of the richest feature cartoons in years, with an attention to detail, foreground and background, that's been missing in recent Disney cartoons.
Bluth takes the movie's single director credit, and his stamp is felt. There's a definite personality behind the picture, which promises a strong if complementary alternative to the Disney style.