Boobie Tassels For Buddha

The Secret of NIMH is an animated film that has always meant quite a lot to me. I am a long time fan of animation of all kinds, but specifically of traditional hand drawn animation. I love the classic Disney movies...Snow White, Pinocchio, Sleeping Beauty...these were as much works of art as they were great movies. In the 70's and early 80's Disney began to move away from the more traditional animation techniques which were costly and time consuming. They were putting out films that used basic animation techniques and relied more on catchy songs than good stories and quality animation.

In 1979 Don Bluth and fellow animators Gary Goldman and John Pomeroy, along with eight other animation staff, left Walt Disney Productions animation department to set up their own independent studio, Don Bluth Productions. They left because they wanted to take animated films back to the classic Disney era with strong characters and stories, and experimenting with unusual and more complex animation techniques.

Among the techniques experimented with were multiple passes on the camera to achieve transparent shadows, and backlit animation (where animated mattes are shot with light shining through color gels to produce glowing areas for artificial light and fire effects), multiple color palettes for characters to fit in different lighting situations, from daylight, to night, to warm environments to underwater. These techniques created effects and details that are only rivaled by modern computer animation and they did everything painstakingly by hand. The staff worked 100 hour weeks to get the movie done on time and under budget and the producers, Bluth, Goldman, Pomeroy and the executive producers at Aurora mortgaged their homes collectively for $700,000 to complete the film.

The Secret of NIMH was their first feature film, based on the novel Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O'Brien. Ironically Disney turned down the offered rights to this book in 1972. Bluth and his team poured their hearts, time, and every skill at their disposal into making this film. From strictly a visual standpoint it is amazing to look at. The animation is detailed and fluid and the backgrounds are stunning. There is not a piece of this movie that you cannot tell had the full attention of the animators.

The story is also quite entertaining and rather dark at times with a fair amount of violence. It's a very real story set in a world of fantasy and science fiction....no fairy tales or prince charmings here. It tells the tale of a field mouse named Mrs. Brisby (they had to change it from Frisby because of trademark issues with Frisbee's) who seeks the help of a tribe of genetically enhanced rats in order to move her home and save her son. It's a complex and moving story with wonderful voice acting and a brilliant score. I don't like talking about plot too much because good stories should be experienced. You can go to Wikipedia if you want a more detailed breakdown of her connection to the rats and what NIMH means.

I highly recommend this movie to any fan of animation, and recommend it in general because it is such a good movie. It is a labor of love by a group of animators that truly loved their art. There is no doubt in my mind that Don Bluth and his team helped push animated film back into prominence and shamed Disney into putting care back into their films, though nothing they've made since can come close to the quality of NIMH or their classic films. It is a masterpiece and I wish more people knew about it. You can find a fully restored version of NIMH on dvd as well as online on Hulu. See it if you can.