Reviewing a classic film: ‘The Secret of NIMH’

Field mice and rats might be uninteresting or repellent to you, but the film “The Secret of NIMH” will change your whole view on the small things. It features beautiful imagery, amazing storytelling that will keep you hooked, and intense scenes that will make you forget this is a G-rated movie. The film, created in 1982, was based on Robert C. O’Brien’s children’s book, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, but it also had a wide appeal to adults.

In “The Secret of NIMH,” the audience follows Mrs. Brisby, a small, widowed field mouse, draped in a small red cloth, who is the mother of four and has to get her family out of the fields before the neighboring farmers start harvesting the forest of wheat in which they reside.

Mrs. Brisby is the mother of two sons and two daughters, Timmy, Martin, Teresa, and Cynthia. One of her sons, Timmy, is gravely ill, and moving would likely cause a setback in his health, so moving into a different house was not an option. So, Ms. Brisby heads to the nearby rat colony for help moving their house with her family inside. These rats are not normal because they have genetically enhanced intelligence due to being tested on by human scientists, and ultimately, they agree to help. 

The backstory of the film has so many interesting twists and turns. According to Wikipedia, after the production of the film’s audio was finished, the director, Don Bluth, realized that they might get sued by Wham-O, the company that makes Frisbees, because of how similar Mrs. Brisby’s original name, Mrs. Frisby, sounded to the popular outdoors toy/activity.

So to avoid being copyrighted, Bluth had careful editing in sound for some lines that couldn’t be altered or rerecorded, changing Mrs. Frisby into Mrs. Brisby. But some parts of the editing didn’t really help in some cases, like the Great Owl’s lines, as some of the audience could still slightly hear the Great Owl say Mrs. Frisby. 

Furthermore, “The Secret of NIMH” was surprisingly not a Disney-made film, but was made by artists who worked at Disney, artists like Gary Goldman, John Pomeroy, and eight other artists who were part of the art/animation team. These artists would later quit their jobs at Disney and start their own studio with Don Bluth, Don Bluth Studios, which was the same studio that made other popular movies that would be sold or taken away by Disney, like Anasatia, The Land Before Time, Thumbelina, and All Dogs Go to Heaven.

Originally, the story Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH was offered to Bluth as a novel to base a movie off of, and Bluth loved the novel, showing it to the same artists who quit Disney, getting their interest in the novel as well. But when Bluth had proposed the idea to Disney directors, they turned them down, “Disney already has a mouse, named Mickey Mouse, and they recently made a similar film about mice named ‘The Rescuers,'” said Wolfgang Reigherman. So the group of Bluth and the ten artists went off to make the movie anyway, without Disney’s help. 

Additionally, NIMH is actually an abbreviation for the National Institute of Mental Health. NIMH is an actual government organization that deals with mental disorders/illnesses, studying them, and finding different ways of treatment for them. In the film, NIMH is the same organization, and they were trying to complete animal testing on rats and mice, but they escaped and developed their own little hidden colony and sanctuary in a bush near the farmer’s house. 

In the original story/novel that Robert C. O’Brein made, the story was more focused on the animal testing done on the rats during their time at NIMH, and was a more realistic genre. But Bluth thought it more fitting to focus the movie on Mrs. Brisby, her family, the rats, and very little on NIMH, giving viewers only a flashback scene of Mrs. Brisby’s time there. Bluth also added a mystical touch to it by having the leader of the rats, Nicodemus, give Mrs. Brisby an amulet that would come in handy near the end of the movie. 

I loved this movie for many reasons. The work that was put into the background had an old Disney movie kind of style, the way that everything looked like it came out of an old Disney princess movie. It might have been just because I was younger and everything might have seemed different for me, but it was one of the best films I had ever seen. 

But now that I am fully looking into it and gaining all this knowledge about the actual “The Secret of NIMH,” my interest in the film grows, and everything that I might not’ve known or noticed before starts to become clearer to me.

When I first started writing about The Secret of NIMH, I had to look up a crude description of the film’s cover, “film with a mouse and an amulet,” to remember its title, and I found out about all the editing and other things that wouldn’t have interested younger me. Some of those things included the information from before about the audio editing, why the art style looked so similar to Disney’s, and the other films/movies Don Bluth Studio was known for.

Some interesting things about the film that stood out to me would be the characters like Nicodemus, Mrs. Brisby, Timmy, the Great Owl, Jeremy (a crow that Mrs. Brisby saved), and Justin (the Captain of the Guard for the rat colony, and would later become their leader).

Nicodemus and the Great Owl stood out to me because of their glowing eyes, which is a rare sight in the film, and because of the way their hair/beards were animated, resulting in very smooth movement. Some of the scenes that “The Secret of NIMH” had that were so intense that I would think about all the time after watching the movie, like a specific scene where Mrs. Brisby was being stressfully chased by a guard rat through the rose bush.

But scenes like that are why I loved the film; it had so many vibrant and strong flashing colors during scenes that were trying to make the viewer be in the moment, and they used the colors so well to signal what the mood of the scene was.

That detailing in the film very well could have been what led me to write about the film in the first place. “The Secret of NIMH” has impacted my childhood so much, and I loved learning about the things that brought this classic story to life.