The Secret of NIMH

The field mouse Mrs Brisby has a sick son and has to move her house before the field is ploughed. To find a way she is forced to go to the colony of rats who escaped the NIMH laboratory, their intelligence raised by experiments. Don Bluth left Disney in 1979 with Gary Goldman and John Pomeroy to start his own studio. The aim was to bring back the classical animation techniques the industry was dropping to save money, and this film was the test of that claim. The production is heavy accordingly. It used rotoscoping, backlit animation with colour gels and multiple colour palettes; Mrs Brisby alone required 46 different lighting variations. Two computerised multiplane cameras were manufactured specifically for it. The voice cast has Elizabeth Hartman as Mrs Brisby, Derek Jacobi as Nicodemus, Dom DeLuise as Jeremy and John Carradine as the Great Owl. On a budget between 6.3 and 7 million dollars it took 14.7 million domestically, with the real profit arriving through home video and overseas sales. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 93 percent. Ebert called it an artistic success and praised a premise he found rare among animated features of the time. It won Best Animated Film at the 1983 Saturn Awards. Who it is for: anyone who wants to see hand-drawn animation at its peak. Who it is not for: small children. The dark tone, the deaths and the sorcery do not deliver what a cartoon promises.