1. The Nostalgic Part
This is another one of those movies I loved as a child, fascinated by and drawn to the dangerous, frightening parts: strange experiments changing you into something you weren’t, companions perishing in a desperate escape, wounds that bleed.

For me this movie has always been blanketed with a layer of tragedy. Bambi is famous for traumatizing children with their first dose of animated death, but in my childhood it was Secret of NIMH that stood out for the weight of physical danger and horrible things being done to you against your will. I wasn’t in any doubt about what happened to those mice that fell down the shaft during the escape, or about the fact that the experiments were horribly painful to the rats. By this time I had seen Star Wars, Clash of the Titans,  and Dragonslayer, but the violence in those live-action movies didn’t affect me the way things in NIMH did. Was NIMH more disturbing because it was less glaringly fantasy-based; because the movie kept things more mysterious; or simply because the story was more intimate so I cared more about the characters? Or was it maybe because all the live-action heroes were fighting back, and the animated mice and rats were so terribly helpless?

2. The Background
The movie is based on a book, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brian, published in 1971. I haven’t read it, but I’ve heard the film changed a lot, which is what you’d expect.

The movie changed the lead character’s name from Frisby to Brisby, and common wisdom says it was to avoid connection with the brand name of a certain “flying disc.” I suspect common wisdom is right, whether that was a legal move necessitated by trademark concerns or simply a worry that her name would make people laugh.

Then much more than now, it was tough to get an animated movie on the theater screen if you weren’t Disney. (This was also before VCRs were common, so there wasn’t even a direct-to-video market.) But this is one of the few that managed it. Don Bluth and his team were helping to blaze a trail for non-Disney animation to be produced and released in the U.S.

3. Scattered Things
Evidently this movie was rated G by people who saw that it was a cartoon and didn’t bother to watch it. It includes vibrant red blood, a deliberate murder, another deliberate killing that was either an effort to save someone else or a bit of revenge (or both), and talk about torture and hearing the screams of laboratory animals at night. The main character is a widow whose husband’s death is the first thing you hear about in the movie. There’s also a quick curse word (spoken by one of the good guys, no less), and I have a suspicion it was thrown in by the filmmakers so the movie would be PG. To no avail.

The movie does an impressive job creating an air of menace and danger in multiple scenes with different threats. Mrs. Brisby is at the mercy of a whole lot of things, whether it’s larger animals or human decisions or illness affecting her children.

I thought the clumsy bird was a crow, but he’s just tiny compared to the cat. On the other hand, the movie—set in North America!—also shows a spider that’s three times the size of a mouse, so I think the animators were a bit unreliable regarding scale.

There’s a quick mention by Mrs. Brisby that her children are better at reading than she is—and while it’s true that learning as a child can be faster than learning as an adult, this is definitely a little nod to the fact that her husband was more than an ordinary mouse and has passed things on to their children.

I am always gripped by scenes of radiant transcendent power summoned by great emotional need to accomplish the impossible just when all hope is gone. And yet I can’t help feeling Secret of NIMH should’ve avoided mixing magic with the science fiction. The amulet, Nicodemus’s whirligig device that shows images from the past, and the rosebush vines that move and rearrange themselves are things I can’t square with the notion that the rats owe their secret world to the intelligence produced in them by medical experimentation.

Before I rewatched this movie, my memory had no doubt that Mrs. Brisby ends up with Justin, the captain of the guard. My memory is wrong. They’re clearly drawn to each other, I wasn’t inventing that, but there’s no hint that they become a couple once the action is over. Which is pretty reasonable but not typical for animated films.