The Secret of NIMH (Don Bluth Productions, Aurora, MGM/United Artists, 1982)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, September 19) at 9 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched an odd movie from 1982 called The Secret of NIMH, which I’d ordered as a Blu-Ray disc from Amazon.com even though it was a home-burned disc rather than a pressed one. (Charles and I realized that when, instead of shutting itself off when the movie ended, the disc started playing the film all over again.) I had ordered this because I was sent a copy of the new Intrada Records CD of Jerry Goldsmith’s soundtrack music for review in Fanfare, and in that regard the movie was a success. Goldsmith’s score was absolutely stunning, appropriately heroic and spooky when the film’s plot called for it. Unlike John Debney in his score for Luck, Goldsmith wasn’t afraid to write truly terrifying music when scenes in the film demanded it. I also loved the fact that The Secret of NIMH was an old-fashioned drawn-animation movie instead of one of those horrible computer-animated things. I don’t like the overall look of computer animation, though there have been a few films in the process, like Ratatouille and Soul, that were so cleverly written and directed they overcame my distaste for computer animation in general. And I also enjoyed the color scheme; the closing credits announced that the film was in Technicolor, and though this was made in 1982, long after the demise of the classic three-strip process, director Don Bluth and his animators achieved some of the same vibrancy. This is a rare modern-day color film that is actually colorful; instead of relying on the murky greens and browns that dominate all too many color films today (especially live-action ones), The Secret of NIMH is a feast for the eyes. It also had an unusually strong cast of voice actors, though it was pretty much the over-the-hill gang even in 1982: Hermione Baddeley, John Carradine, Derek Jacobi, Dom DeLuise, Shannen Doherty, Peter Strauss, Paul Shenar, Aldo Ray.

The film’s biggest defect was its plot, or rather its lack thereof. It was based on a 1971 children’s novel called Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien (true name: Robert Leslie Carroll Conly), and adapted into a screenplay by Bluth, John Pomeroy, Gary Goldman, and Will Finn. It’s the sort of story that because it’s a fantasy, the writers figured they could make anything happen, whether or not it made any narrative or dramatic sense. The central character is Mrs. Brisby (the writing committee changed her name so she wouldn’t be confused with the Frisbee toy, whose makers, Wham-O, actually threatened to sue if the name “Frisby” was used), voiced by Elizabeth Hartman in her last film. She was a stunning young actress who made her screen debut with Sidney Poitier in the 1965 film A Patch of Blue, in which she played a blind girl who falls in love with Poitier’s character without knowing he’s Black – though, to her credit, she stays in love with him even after her racist mother (Shelley Winters) “outs” him. Alas, Hartman’s life was marked by severe depression – which seems to have worked her way into her career as well; among her stage roles were the clinically depressed Laura Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’s play The Glass Menagerie, and she named the famously introverted Emily Dickinson as her favorite writer. In 1987, five years after making The Secret of NIMH, she committed suicide by throwing herself out of the fifth-floor window of her apartment. Unlike the real-life actress playing her, Mrs. Brisby is indomitable, driven to do whatever she needs in order to protect the four children she had with her late husband. Oh, did I tell you she’s also a field mouse living on a farm belonging to a guy named Fitzgibbons (Tom Hatten)?

One of her kids, Timmy, has developed a fever and so Mrs. Brisby goes to see another mouse, Mr. Ages (Arthur Malet), to get a diagnosis and treatment. Mr. Ages gives her an envelope containing a medicine and instructs her to dose Timmy with it every day for three weeks. He also tells her that she must keep Timmy absolutely immobile for the three-week course of the treatment, which is a problem because “Moving Day” is fast approaching. Mrs. Brisby and her children live in a small concrete enclosure in the middle of a farm, and the farmer is about to do his spring planting and that process will destroy their home and force Mrs. Brisby and her kids to relocate. Fortunately, Mrs. Brisby’s Auntie Shrew (Hermione Baddeley) is able to give her a temporary reprieve by sabotaging Farmer Fitzgibbons’s tractor. Along the way back home Mrs. Brisby meets Jeremy (Dom DeLuise), a crow who’s trying to build himself a nest out of variously colored strings to serve as a love nest for himself and whatever girl crow he meets along the way. On the way home Jeremy saves Mrs. Brisby from a gigantic but not particularly active cat named Dragon and rescues the crucial envelope containing Timmy’s medicine. Jeremy also urges Mrs. Brisby to get advice on her housing situation from The Great Owl (John Carradine). Mrs. Brisby protests on the ground that owls eat mice, but she goes anyway and the owl in turn tells her to visit a colony of rats living on the Fitzgibbons farm. The rat colony is led by Nicodemus (Derek Jacobi), whom we saw in a prologue dictating a memoir. It turns out the rats were part of a secret experiment conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in which they were genetically modified to become smarter and live longer, only they escaped and NIMH is sending out goon squads either to recapture or kill them. (Casting NIMH agents as the principal villains seems all too timely these days, when President Trump and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. are systematically destroying America’s entire public health infrastructure.)

One problem with the rats is that the genetic modifications make them dependent on modern technology for their own survival – which explains the marvelous scene in which they’re running a bootleg power cord to the Fitzgibbons home to steal power for their colony, much the way a lot of Third World people who can’t afford electricity themselves steal it from those better off. Eventually Mrs. Brisby and the NIMH rats conceive of the idea of levitating her house off its foundation, for which they first have to drug the cat Dragon so it won’t interfere. Jenner (Paul Shenar), a NIMH rat villain, sabotages the process and the house falls and kills Nicodemus. Justin (Peter Strauss), the friendly captain of the rats’ guard, and Sullivan (Aldo Ray), who was Jenner’s accomplice until he saw what he was doing was wrong and switched sides, take out Jenner. Just then the entire ground under the Fitzgibbons’ home starts sinking and turning into mud, but Mrs. Brisby is able to save the day with the help of a magic amulet that automatically activates itself whenever its wearer shows courage. Ultimately the house is saved, Mrs. Brisby nurses her son Timmy to health, and Jeremy the clumsy crow finally finds a girlfriend of his own species. The Secret of NIMH’s plot is so preposterously complicated and filled with unbelievable incidents I literally had a hard time staying awake for it, despite the sheer physical beauty of the animation and the power of Jerry Goldsmith’s music. The score contains a song, “Flying Dreams,” composed by Goldsmith to lyrics by 1970’s singer-songwriter Paul Williams, which is heard twice: sung by Mrs. Brisby (voiced by Sally Stevens because Elizabeth Hartman couldn’t sing) as a lullaby to her sick child Timmy and again during the closing credits by Williams himself. I had been under the impression that The Secret of NIMH was a financial flop, but according to the film’s Wikipedia page it made $15 million on a $7 million investment and did well enough at the box office that they were able to make a sequel, The Secret of NIMH 2: Timmy to the Rescue, though that was produced in-house by the animation division of MGM/United Artists without Don Bluth’s involvement and with only two of the original voice actors (Dom DeLuise and Arthur Malet) repeating their roles. It flopped.