The Secret of NIMH

Don Bluth left Disney in 1979 with a group of fellow animators, and The Secret of NIMH is what they made when they got out: a hand-drawn film from Robert C. O’Brien’s novel Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, about a widowed field mouse who must move her house before the plough arrives and cannot, because her youngest is too ill to be carried. It runs 83 minutes and carries a U certificate. It is a good film, drawn with more care than almost anything the studio it came from was making at the time, and it is let down by a script that keeps adding things to a story that needed nothing added.

Start with the drawing, because that is what Bluth wanted us to see. Every background has three or four layers to it; the farmhouse is lit at night from its windows and from the moon, and the rats’ city under the rosebush is a cavern of cogs, pulleys and strings of electric light. Light is painted on rather than suggested: the amulet glows, Nicodemus’s eyes glow, dust hangs in the shafts from the barn door. The Great Owl sequence is the film’s best few minutes. Mrs. Brisby climbs into a hollow tree hung with cobwebs and bones, a spider drops behind her, the owl’s eyes come on like lamps, and it crushes a moth in one talon while it considers whether to eat her. We were frightened, and we are not eight.

The voices are well chosen. Elizabeth Hartman plays Mrs. Brisby thin and slightly fraying, a small creature at the far end of what she can bear, and she never once sounds like an actress doing a mouse. John Carradine gives the owl a voice as dry and old as the tree. Derek Jacobi’s Nicodemus is slow and grave, Peter Strauss makes Justin exactly the bright, capable rat a widow would hope to meet, and Paul Shenar’s Jenner does everything a villain can do short of twirling a moustache. Hermione Baddeley is funny as the bossy Auntie Shrew. Dom DeLuise, as Jeremy the crow, is the film’s one concession to the idea that children need someone falling over every ten minutes, and the joke about string is done long before the film stops telling it.

Jerry Goldsmith’s score is large, strings and brass at full stretch, a flute for the mouse and a lullaby she sings over the sick child, and it is mixed as if this were a war film. Mostly that is right: the music carries the fear when the pictures are gentle. Jeffrey C. Patch cuts the first half hour tightly, one errand after another, and lets the middle stretch of rat council and rat history slacken. At 83 minutes nothing outstays its welcome for long.

The trouble is the script, which has four names on it: Bluth, John Pomeroy, Gary Goldman and Will Finn. O’Brien’s book is a plain, sober story about a mouse and some clever rats. The film gives Nicodemus a red stone on a chain that lights up when Mrs. Brisby is brave, and near the end it does something we will not describe and the film cannot account for. It also crowds the mouse out of her own story. For a good twenty minutes in the middle she stands at the edge of the frame while rats argue about a plan and a knife, and we found ourselves wanting the film to go back to her. The rats’ history, told in a flashback around the halfway mark, is the source of the title and of the film’s best idea, and once it has been told the film does almost nothing with it.

Set against what Bluth made afterwards, An American Tail (1986) and The Land Before Time (1988), this is the rougher and the more interesting picture, the one that frightens rather than reassures. Set against Watership Down (1978), the other great film about small animals in a field with something coming for them, it trusts its book less and is the poorer for it.

Watch it at home with a child who can take a fright, and keep an arm free for the owl. The drawing looks better the closer you sit, and the amulet makes no more sense from any distance.