G, 1 hr. 22 min. Directed by: Don Bluth. Release Date: July 2, 1982. DVD Release Date: March 6, 2001.
This admission will probably come as a shock to people my age: I’d never seen this movie (in its entirety) before today. I’d seen a few pieces over the years, maybe as much as ten minutes total, but I’ve never sat down and watched the whole thing from start to finish. I had friends when I was in grade school who LOVED this movie, I remember people having lunchboxes designed around this movie, back when a kid’s lunchbox proudly proclaimed their favorite TV shows, comic books, or movies.
There are two things that strike me about this movie: the first is how much it looks like The Black Cauldron, which I talked about a month or so ago. Don Bluth left Disney in 1972, and Cauldron wouldn’t hit theaters for another few years, but there are striking physical similarities between Disney’s release and this one, which make me suspect Cauldron was part of Disney’s direct efforts to undermine Bluth’s new studio. The second thing is how gritty this movie is. It covers, death, violence, murder, and the negative aspects of animal testing before coming to a close. It’s not entirely dark, but this isn’t one of Disney’s light and airy animated films, so it’s not for the person who is faint of heart (by which I mean a wussy).
I had some difficulty following along with all the back story being referenced in the dialogue. Nicodemus, the leader of the rats of NIMH, has several voice overs where he talks about Mrs. Brisby, the main character, and her role to play in upcoming events like we’re all on board, and I really wasn’t. There were several major elements of the story where I was forced to accept that the events taking place were rational, even though I wasn’t totally sure what was going on. For an animated film, this also seems to suffer from a plethora of named characters, spanning multiple species, and each with its own combination of agendas. Add in the “secret” going on through the story, and I had to really pay attention to make sure I had even a tenuous grip on the facts.
The animation is beautifully done, but it’s nothing you haven’t seen if you’ve seen any of Bluth’s American Tail or Land Before Time movies. Despite the fact that Bluth left Disney because he thought the animation giant was getting more than a little stale, there doesn’t seem to be a vast gap between his work here and Disney’s (relatively) concurrent releases: The Fox and The Hound in 1981 and The Great Mouse Detective in 1986. The subject matter is very different, although Mouse Detective has some of the darkness we see in NIMH, but the artistic interpretation seems more similar than dissimilar. Some of the... glimmering effects and the play of light and sparkles in the movie were unfamiliar to me, but otherwise this felt a lot like a bunch of other stuff that I'd seen before.
My feelings about this movie are mixed. Technically, I think it’s well done, but I’m not certain that it’s appropriate for the kids that it was made for. Older kids are probably okay, but I’d make sure the little ones are watching something else somewhere else before you pop it in.
