Eisenstein is supposed to have said, in the late thrities, that the two great geniuses the cinema had produced were Chaplin and Disney. Few, of course, would contest Chaplin, but equally few would be eager to champion Disney. It is, in fact, amusing that critics who make allowances for a shallow manipulator like Steven Spielberg are quick to pounce on the sentimentality, the coyness of Disney.
It is only in the last dozen years or so that critics have forgiven Charles Dickens for his coyness and sentimentality and noticed he has other qualities that more than comepensate for these drawbacks. At this rate it will be almost a century before Disney is absolved and fully recognized for the vitality, the visual power he brought to the movie screen. For, in the 15 years or so between the introduction of sound and the initial release of "Fantasia" no one did more to exploit the emotional inpact of the soundtrack and every inch of the screen.
Animation, alas, is a labor intensive art, and Disney's maladroit handling of the union struggle in his studio left him unable to recreate the extraordinarily rich animation he achieved in "Pinocchio" or "Bambi" during the last two decades of his life.
The studio's most recent effort, "Tron," is an attempt to move animation in an entirely different direction. Happily some Disney studio dissidents, not pleased with the change in approach and reluctant to let the art Disney developed die from sheer neglect, have made a marvelous attempt to recreate the glory days in "The Secret of NIMH." Just as the cornerstone of the Disney empire was a resourceful mouse, "NIMH" is a story about embattled mice and rats (refugees from the experimental laboratories of the National Institute of Mental Health) and their struggle for survival. The story is not as gripping as Disney's generally were, but the animation itself is dazzling, easily the best feature-length demonstration of the art since "101 Dalmations" and "The Aristocats," the last two features really to bear Disney's own imprint.
The sense of color, the sense of composition and the sense of drama (particularly in a stunning 30-second sequence in which a mother mouse has to demobilize a tractor to save her family) recall better days even if they don't completely resurrect them. Best of all, the artists have that special gift for creating characters with animal features but indelible human personalities that distinguished the Disney films -- the strongest here is a largely irrelevant but delightful crow (whose voice is an uncharacteristically unself-conscious Dom De Luise).
Also in the Disney tradition, the film has a strong score by Jerry Goldsmith and piquant voices for all the characters (including Hermione Baddeley, John Carradine, Derek Jacobi and Peter Strauss). In "The Secret of NIMH" one of the great arts of the cinema gets a new lease on life and that is wonderful news.