The Secret of NIMH: An Introduction...

It all started with a book. A book, called Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. This would be the book that would earn the Newberry Award, get a movie made from it, and (in terms of this website) most importantly, get people OBSESSED with it. To the best of my tiny knowledge, I know of no other animated film that has aroused this type of obsession. Case in point- this movie impressed me enough to give me an obsession about it, until I decided to make this webpage. No other single film has come CLOSE to doing that...

Why am I so obsessed about this movie? For 3 good reasons. One, it features the best Western animation to be found ANYWHERE. Disney doesn't even come close. Two, its plot, although diminished (and therefore less interesting) from the book, is still great, and the tweaks Bluth made on it actually nearly made it even better. Third, its closeness to the original intentions of the author. I have a feeling that Robert O'Brien, creator of the book, would have enjoyed this movie greatly, if he had seen it. What are the importance of these three? Well, I'll go into it, I guess...

• Animation. When the The Secret of NIMH was made, Don Bluth and around a dozen other animators had recently split from Disney. They had split because they felt Disney had lost its touch in animation, and was getting to cheap. Don Bluth had something to prove here, and he proved it. He used techniques Disney had thrown out so it could earn more profit. By drawing the same scene from many different angles, and fusing them, he created a more realistic, nearly 3-D world. This technique is little used today, because again for expense reasons, so this movie is one of the few rare animation gems out there...
• Plot. Although it's pretty different from the book, it still remains very good. The plot actually makes SENSE, and not only that, remains interesting as time goes by. A bad sense of plot can be seen in the Disney movie Hercules, which was (in my opinion) also a disaster animated-wise. Here, the plot flows smoothly, as all who have watched the movie could see, and even the antagonists (Jenner, Dragon) remain interesting, unlike today's Disney movies...The characters are well developed, and some scenes can be really touching.
• Closeness to Original Intentions of Author. Fairly close, for an animated film. There were weak parts, like how the rats GOT to the rosebush, but they were serious enough to detriment the movie. (The book takes care of this very well.) However, I feel that it could have been more interesting, if the movie was aloowed more time to explain the rats' journeys to the Fitzgibbon farm, and afterwards, their move to Thorn Valley. Compared to, say, Disney's The Black Cauldron or The Hunchback of Notre Dame, this movie keeps very close to the original.