Too much of everything

Really Surprised!

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

The use of lighting and color in this film captivated my imagination completely.

I'm not going to bother with what CULT as an acronym means. As some background, this film was pitched shortly after Don Bluth left Disney in 1979 over production values in The Fox and The Hound. As a first film for an animation studio, the Disney-esque art style and story really blew me away when I saw it on TV. The animation has some Disney mojo mixed in with subtle originality, and quite a few times I went "Whoa" at how well done the effects were, such as colored light flashes. The characters, while being worth our eyes, are actually not highly memorable, and the cast to a modern person would seem incredibly obscure (despite how their performances are amazing). The story presents a lot of darkness and mystery, with anxiety or intrigue in an absolute majority of the frames. 15 years after having left our childhood memories with Tom and Jerry, Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer makes the wise decision to distribute this film (but oh God no they made a sequel), and not long after it lost popularity, CULT grew. See it should you consider it, because for the most part, it deserves CULT.

The Secret of NIMH is usually praised as a classic, a masterpiece, and the best work of Don Bluth. I enjoy The Land Before Time, another movie by him, so naturally I had quite high expectations for this movie. However, it was a big disappointment.Right from the beginning, the story has shown how silly it is. Somehow, the movie's heroine is willing to risk the safety of her three children, and waste a lot of time doing all kinds of dangerous errands just because 'the air is bad' for her fourth child. Why not just find a warm blanket, wrap him up and run? With all those people around, they could even carry his bed with him on it. That whole deal is clearly just a poor excuse to get the story going. And then things got worse. Characters just keep appearing out of nowhere with dim intentions and unexplained relations. What is the relationship between the Great Owl and the rats? What is the rats' plan exactly? What does the villain really want? How does NIHM know about their hideout? And what's so special about NIHM if normal mice like Mrs Brisby can do what those rats and mice from NIHM do anyway? Questions after questions about the plot keep popping up but never get answered. Finally comes the horrible ending which was just a total deus ex machina. The rats, who before that point were just intelligent animals that relied on technology, somehow managed to create magical artifacts, which the heroine was given for some unknown reasons, and then used to save the day. The end. An utterly terrible and lazy excuse of a plot.The animation, despite being quite good for its time, especially with the special effects, is still not really satisfying for me due to the simple and unimaginative backgrounds. And the sound editing is just terrible compared to Disney movies of the same period. To sum up, this movie may be good for the 1980s thanks to having a more complex plot than most other animated movies at the time, but judging from today's point of view, it's a very flawed and forgettable product.

The reason why I sat down and watched this is because I have never seen a Don Bluth movie and I heard his 80's films were back then the equivalent to what Pixar is now. I decided to sit down and watch this and while I did very much enjoy this movie - I thought it isn't really as good as everybody is building it up to be but at the movie was pretty good.The plot is that a mouse who lives in a cornfield named Mrs Brisby is trying to help treat her son's pneumonia and through many different circumstances arising like the farmer plowing the cornfield and the mice stopping it before it reaches him she manages to find a society of rats who intellectually operate on the same (if not similar) level to human beings, which her late husband saved.Onto what I enjoyed. I really enjoyed the fact that instead of being pretty much an average everyday animated movie - This challenges kids in the way that there are some scenes that may frighten them along with presenting them with a couple of interesting ideas. I think the animation is superb, the voice acting is pretty good and the characters are likable in their own right.I guess my biggest complaint with the movie is Jeremy. I didn't find him annoying or anything but I felt that he didn't serve that much relevance to the plot. All I saw this character do in the movie that served the plot is take Mrs Brisby to The Great Owl and the rats of NIMH, That's it.So I guess if you like Don Bluth or want to watch a children's film that is just as entertaining to kids as it is to adults then this movie is certainly a must-watch. Just be sure to have some expectations in check, I mean this isn't for younger kids. Based on this, even though I didn't like this movie as much as others, I will watch some other Don Bluth movies in the future.