80s Animated Classic Disney Refused To Make Started A Revolution
For generations, Disney has been the standard for animated films, and it’s only within the last decade that Illumination has slowly overtaken the giant, but other studios have taken shots at the king before. No one came closer to knocking Disney from the top of the mountain than Don Bluth, a former Disney animator who had a great idea for a movie, but the House that Mickey Built turned him. So Bluth left, took some of Disney’s staff with him, and went about launching his independent career with The Secret of NIMH.
Don Bluth Fell In Love With The Book
The Secret of NIMH adapts the book Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, a rather dark tale about a field mouse who needs to relocate her house before the farmer starts plowing his field. That might not sound like a dark story, but both the book and the film treat it with the utmost seriousness as a matter of life and death for this family; thankfully for Mrs. Brisby (changed in the film), there’s a group of hyper-intelligent escaped lab rats giving nearby that agree to help out.
Stabbing Rats
The rats, escapees from the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH), age slowly and have a boosted, nearly human level of intelligence. Led by the elderly Nicodemus, they hatch a plan to drug the farmer’s deadly house cat and use an intricate system of pulleys and levers to move the Brisby family’s entire home. Of course, things don’t go according to plan, and for all of the scary (for a children’s movie) imagery, The Secret of NIMH has an uplifting ending that involves multiple rats getting stabbed.
Disney Had A Mouse Limit
Don Bluth fell in love with the novel and pitched making The Secret of NIMH while he was at Disney, but he was stonewalled for two reasons: one, The Rescuers, another darkish film starring mice, had come out only a few years previously in 1977, and two, that other rodent, Mickey Mouse, meant all mouse-related products had an extra layer of scrutiny. Bluth ended up leaving Disney, formed his own company, hired a bunch of Disney employees, and made the movie a reality.
Doing Things Different
Breaking away from how Disney handled voice acting, Don Bluth hired a few celebrities for The Secret of NIMH, including John Carradine (the father of Keith and David), Dom Deluise, Peter Strauss, and Elizabeth Hartman. Those names may not mean much to you today, but they were all accomplished award-winning stars, and joining them were future stars, including Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Wil Wheaton and Charmed’s Shannon Doherty.
Launched A Disney Competitor
The Secret Of NIMH was a critical success and is now considered a classic, but in 1982, it failed to make enough at the box office to keep Don Bluth’s new company afloat, but there’s a silver lining. Bluth, one year later, helped form the Don Bluth Group, and the first product of this new studio (his second in three years) was the instant classic arcade game Dragon’s Lair. That, combined with the resounding success of NIMH on VHS, helped the second studio stay afloat and go on to make history.
Because Disney passed on the adaptation he wanted to make, Bluth ended up taking the first steps in his 20-year head-to-head battle with Disney, going from An American Tale to The Land Before Time, and then in the 90s, Anastasia, the best non-Disney Princess movie of all time, and finally, Titan A.E., an underrated sci-fi gem.
It’s A Timeless Film
REVIEW SCORE
A sequel to The Secret of NIMH was released in 1998, but it has nothing to do with Don Bluth’s original. The Secret of NIMH 2: Timmy to the Rescue was direct-to-VHS trash. Instead, only watch the original classic, which I think still holds up today as Bluth’s classic animation style, which he learned from Walt Disney himself, is simply timeless.
You can stream The Secret of NIMH on Tubi, Pluto TV, and The Roku Channel. It will be a cold day in Hell when it’s on Disney+.
