At the moment when the precarious art of animation has been all but lost in the static lethargy of such recent examples as Heavy Metal and American Pop, not to mention Disney's The Fox and the Hound, here is The Secret of NIMH to save, if not the day, certainly the art form.
One could be forgiven for believeing that animation, like tapestry making, had been sacrificed to the demands of economics.
NIMH, lovingly crafted by producer-director Don Bluth and a group of renegades from the Disney studio, returns the sumptuous detail and movement to animation, as well as the story-teller's craft.
Even as it opens today at the Imperial Six, it is something of an instant classic in the genre, principally because it does not neglect the antecedants from which it sprang.
Walt himself might have been delighted with NIMH. Certainly, he would recognize its traditions, rich draftsmanship, careful plotting, and original character development.
Bluth realizes a truth from the old Disney animated masterpieces, no matter how nicely rendered the background paintings, they don't mean anything unless they are fronted by characters you can care about.
There are enough comically inclined eccentrics scattered throughout NIMH to satisfy the traditionalists, including a stumblebum crow, a huge omnipotent owl, a widowed mother field mouse and her frightened brood.
What sets NIMH apart is its rather brave attempt to do for rats what Mickey did long ago for mice. These rats, escaped from a laboratory, living beneath a rose bush in a farmer's field, have been injected with some sort of serum by a myterious group of scientists working for an outfit called the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), that has had the effect of making them more intelligent than human beings.
This is the sort of plotline that would be hooted off the screen in a live action movie. But of course the fascination of NIMH has nothing to do with live action. Bluth remembers that animation originally was intriguing because of the swooping feats of imagination of which it is capable, its ability to create worlds that could not otherwise exist on the screen.
In NIMH there is an entire underworld, by parts enchanting as well as frightening, dark places found under stones and deep inside wells, full of long passages and hidden spaces where lurk sage old wizards, nasty villains, and the little field mouse, Mrs. Brisby, who starts out in search of medicine for her ailing son. The world was created for a novel called "Mrs. Brisby and the Rats of NIMH, and given original veracity by Bluth and his crew of up to 150 animators who worked 2 1/2 years on a budget of $7 million.
The money, Bluth pointed out the other day, is hardly outrageous, considering that the Disney studio spent four years and $12 million to turn out the lacklustre Fox and the Hound, an animated feature that is to NIMH what the Soviet sputnik is to the Columbia space shuttle.
In fact, it was while working on The Fox and the Hound that Bluth, along with fellow animators John Pomeroy and Gary Goldman decided to get out of the Disney organization and start their own company.
"I was with Disney nine years altogether," Bluth recalls, "and the more I looked at what we were making, the more I could see we were making what we made before." And making it more carelessly. In The Rescuers, for example, one of the characters was given the same color eyes and skin in order to save time. In Walt's time such short cuts would have been unthinkable. Worse, in The Fox and the Hound, a waterfall that did not move was allowed to appear on screen.
Bluth, 44, started with Disney when he was only 18, "a dream come true" at a time when Walt himself still prowled the corridors.
Everyone could remember when the dream factory was running full tilt with 1,500 animators who in an astounding burst of creativity turned out five animated features in five years (they were Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi, which, ironically, is reopening today, also at the Imperial Six). "Everyone was afraid of Walt, he scared everyone," Bluth remembers. "Yet, everyone wanted to perform for him. Walt had a lot of energy, and he inspired the people around him."
Bluth, a quiet-spoken, clear-eyed Mormon, left Disney after a year and a half to participate in a teaching and recruiting mission in Argentina, and later attended Brigham Young University where he majored in English. When he finally returned to Disney in 1971 to join the studio's new training program and work on the animated feature version of Robin Hood, he discovered things had changed drastically.
Disney had died in 1966 and now "everything was run by committee. It was all very impersonal. You came in at 8 o'clock in the morning, and left at 5. People were actually standing around saying, 'We'll never make pictures like Walt's again.' In that sort of environment, nothing can happen."
So Bluth decided to escape it. Yet ironically he has not escaped at all. In The Secret of NIMH, it is clear that Bluth, rather than shaking Walt's memory and striking out on his own, has assiduously recreated the sort of story and art that would have pleased the old boss in the days when he loved to sneak around at night peering at his animators' storyboards.
In performing the recreation Bluth not only saves the art of animation, but more importantly delights audiences as well. Next time, perhaps with the $11 million animated feature titled East of the Sun, West of the Moon he begins this month, we will see less of Walt and more of Bluth.
For the moment, though, Don Bluth's obsession in observing the rituals of the almost lost art of the old Disney studio provides one of the season's entertainment treasures.