Don Bluth's 1982 Directorial Debut The Secret of NIMH Is an Animation Masterpiece That Traumatized Multiple Generations of Children
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the site and career-sustaining column where I give YOU, the ferociously sexy, intimidatingly brilliant Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for each additional selection.
I love writing about children’s films so traumatic and deeply scarring that decades after experiencing them, readers/patrons feel the need to process the experience by paying an internet oddball one hundred dollars to determine whether or not they are, in fact, as bracingly, unnecessarily dark as they remember.
Judging by the number of deeply traumatizing, kid-unfriendly kid films I’ve covered for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 you like to select and read about movies of that ilk as well.
The latest Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 child-traumatizing choice is 1982’s The Secret of NIMH, a modern classic renowned for its gorgeous, innovative animation and for scaring the bejesus out of kiddies with a plot choked with death, torture, danger, drugging and other elements not generally found in G rated movies.
I was astonished to learn that The Secret of NIMH got a G rating. Director Don Bluth and his team of animators were shocked as well. They hoped to slide by with a PG rating due to the many dark and disturbing sequences in the film and were gobsmacked to receive the most family-friendly rating possible.
Bluth and his fellow traitors were so passionate about The Secret of NIMH that when Disney, the company behind such nightmare fuel as Dumbo, Bambi, and Pinocchio, understandably rejected Robert C. O’Brien’s 1971 children’s book Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH for being too dark they quit and started up a rival company.
When I was a kid, Johnny Carson was considered such a national treasure that if someone were to take him on by mounting a competing late-night talk show, it was seen as unpatriotic, unAmerican, and in inherently questionable taste.
Alan Thicke of Thicke of the Night got around that by being Canadian. Competitors like Joan Rivers weren’t as lucky. Carson never got over a woman like Rivers having the audacity to compete with him. Neither did America. Oh sure, Rivers had a pretty good next three decades or so, but the damage was done.
It was the same with Disney. For decades, Disney came close to having a monopoly on movie animation. They were the big dogs, the gold standard, the legendary studio all other animation studios were compared to and found lacking.
Holy shit the colors here are AMAZING
Oh sure, there were the occasional hit independent animated film like Ralph Bakshi’s Fritz the Cat, but when it came to feature-length animation, Disney didn’t have any real competition.
Nowadays, there are lots of animation studios and non-Disney cartoons, but when Don Bluth made his directorial debut in 1982 with The Secret of NIMH after honing his craft as a Disney animator, it was seen as incredibly ballsy to leave Disney and then directly compete with it with your very first film.
Bluth audaciously set out to make a film that did the seemingly impossible: a Disney-style film with animation that wasn’t just on par with the animation giant but substantially better.
The Secret of NIMH costs about seven million dollars. That was about half of what Disney was spending per film at the time but also, notably, substantially more than the vast majority of non-Disney animated up to that point.
Bluth was able to best his old employers because he and many of his colleagues at Don Bluth Productions were Disney alums making a deeply personal project they felt passionately enough to risk their careers on while Disney was in a deep slump and churning out feature-length animated films because that’s what people expected and demanded of them.
While The Secret of NIMH was only a modest success at the box office, it did very well on home video and established its director and his compatriots as a real force in cinematic animation.
Bluth’s deliciously dark film opens by reminding us of death's omnipresence and the central role it plays in our lives and the lives of its characters.
The film exists in the outsized shadow of Jonathan Brisby, a genetically enhanced mouse who is very heroic, very loved, and very dead.
“Jonathan, wherever you are, your thoughts must comfort her tonight. She’ll be waiting, and you will not return,” implores a wise old sage named Nicodemus to his dead friend.
The voice performance and animation really drive home how deeply traumatized poor Mrs. Brisby is by her husband’s untimely death, something she knows nothing about.
Mrs. Brisby yearns for her dear, departed soulmate to love her and protect her from an almost unfathomably dark and dangerous world, but he is too busy being dead to help her in anything more than an abstract, spiritual sense.
The much-mourned mouse’s righteous spirit seems to inhabit a red amulet that figures prominently in the plot.
The Secret of NIMH never stops reminding us how loved and dead Jonathan Brisby really was, but in the early going, it looks like another beloved member of the Brisby family might meet an untimely end.
Poor Mrs. Frisby’s son Timmy has pneumonia. In a scene I am fairly certain would be cut if the film were made today, Mrs. Frisby asks an extremely intelligent mouse named Mr. Ames what’s wrong with her son. He tells her, “Your son has pneumonia. It’s not uncommon, but you can die from it.”
This information undoubtedly scared the shit out of children convinced that they were going to die from pneumonia, as the overly intense talking mouse said in that terrifying rat cartoon.
Mrs. Frisby’s precocious son asks his mom, “Is Timmy going to die?” Thankfully, the answer is no.
During her daily rounds, Mrs. Frisby meets a comic relief crow named Jeremy, voiced by Dom DeLuise, who is the film’s lightest, most annoying, and least successful element.
Due to the cocaine used throughout Hollywood in the late 1960s and 1970s, there was a widespread delusion among studios, filmmakers, and folks like Mel Brooks and Burt Reynolds that Dom DeLuise was the funniest man in the history of the universe and should be allowed to improvise and ad-lib as much as he wanted regardless of whether it stopped the film cold or not.
It’s like the current mania to cast Pete Davidson in everything and then encourage him to do his wacky shtick, whether it makes sense or not.
Then again, I can see why the filmmakers might want to make audiences forget that Mrs. Frisby and her children could die horrible deaths by getting murdered by the same sociopathic feline that killed their father or by The Great Owl, a terrifying bird with spooky, sinister eyes who kills reflexively, without thinking.
Luckily for our plucky heroine, The Great Owl takes pity on her and encourages her to visit a group of super-intelligent rats and their wise, mystical leader, Nicodemus.
Mrs. Frisby learns that the rats were experimented upon along with other abused animals. Nicodemus says of these unfortunate animals, “They were put through the most unspeakable torture,” while all of the mice other than Jonathan Frisby and Mr. Ages were “sucked down deep air shafts to their deaths.”
The Secret of NIHM is a G-rated family film, however, so while it is considerate enough to let kids know that these adorable animals suffered “unspeakable torture,” they do not actually show the poor bunnies, mice or rabbits having their genitalia shocked with electric prods. Maybe that’s in the Director’s Cut.
The Secret of NIMH is a film of great beauty, horror, and darkness. The meticulously realized set pieces are often breathtaking.
Bluth understands that the best children’s films scar as well as entertain so he has made a stunning work of pure animation that also works on a narrative level.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that one of these movies is substantially better than the other.
The Secret of NIMH makes us endure a lot of darkness, danger, and death before it reaches the light and a much-deserved happy ending.
I saw The Secret of NIMH in the theater when it came out. I was six years old, so I imagine that the parts of the film that did not confuse me scared me, but in a good way.
I haven’t seen everything Blum directed, but I can’t imagine that he ever topped his debut, a stunning masterpiece of animation and a movie guaranteed to freak out its ostensible target audience of children who have no idea what they’re in for.
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