Traditional trappings frame ‘NIMH”

By Michael Maza, Republic Staff  
Arizona Republic
July 1982 

      The Secret of NIHM looks like a traditional animated family film.  That’s not surprising.  It was created by a group of former Walt Disney Productions employees.  The film’s look is lush.  Loaded with rich colors and painstaking backgrounds, Secret includes tons of fairy dust along with some impressive light effects.
      Even more important, the characters’ motion is fluidly believable—a quality sadly lacking in today’s Saturday morning TV cartoons. While Bluth and Company haven’t mastered the trick of giving texture to their beasties’ fur, their characters, mostly mice and rats, are distinctive and lack the too-cute features of so many anthropomorphized animation animals.
      Based on a story by Robert C. O’Brien, Secret revolves about the problems of mouse widow Mrs. Brisby (given voice by Elizabeth Hartman).  One of Mrs. Brisby’s children has pneumonia and can’t be moved, but relocation is a necessity—the Brisby home is in a farmer’s field and plowing time is near.  (The house itself is a cement block; don’t ask what a cement block is doing in a farmer’s field.)  After preliminary tangles with the farmer’s tractor and a nasty one-eyed tomcat—two of Secret’s too many villains—Mrs. Brisby finds help from a strange breed of intelligent rats. 
      She also gets drawn into a plot by evil rat Jenner (Paul Shenar) to wrest power from kindly, scrupulous leader Nicodemus (Derek Jacobi), and the captain of his guards, valiant Justin (Peter Strauss).   Added complexity—it seems a bit much for younger children—comes from magic, the rats’ own moving problems, and a forbidding owl (John Carradine).  There’s also comic relief, provided by a clumsy, romantic crow named Jeremy (Dom Deluise). 
 Secret has plenty of repetition to get its story across; the multiple villains produce some mildly scary moments, but none that measure up to Snow White’s.
      For adults, the movie has two potential points of impact.  The rats, it seems, are escapees from NIMH—the National Institute of Mental Health, where, the movie says, they were subjected to “unspeakable tortures to satisfy scientific curiosity.”  The anti-vivisectionist theme is quickly dispensed with; Secret seems unlikely to anger proponents of animal experimentation the way Bambi infuriates hunters when it resurfaces every seven years.   The role in the proceedings played by Mrs. Brisby also might interest some adults.  She courageously tiptoes into some very forbidding places in her quest for family safety.  She uses her brains to get out of a trap.  But when action is called for, she panics, and successfully handles the movie’s key crisis only with the aid of magic powers—powers she hands over to the new male in her life as soon as the crisis has passed. The Secret of NIMH clings to traditional sex roles, as well as traditional animation.

      SECOND OPINION:  From Variety:  “. . . a richly animated and skillfully structured film that should finally test whether there still remains a family audience for now.  Disney-type pictures beyond the Disney re-issue themselves.”

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