The Secret of NIMH (1982)

The result of our latest social media poll charting listeners’ favourite Don Bluth animated film yields the focus of Episode 86, where Chris and Alex uncover The Secret of NIMH (Don Bluth, 1982), the filmmaker’s very first animated feature and one that would set the template for his tone and style to follow. Following up their recent episode on The Land Before Time (Don Bluth, 1988), listen as they sit down to discuss the mechanical vs. the magical in the way Bluth constructs his detailed animated world; the metonymic representation of humanity and questions of scale; the film’s reflexive treatment of anthropomorphic (even therianthropic) characters by folding the nature/culture divide common to anthropomorphs into its narrative of animal testing and experimentation; gender and motherhood in the film’s portrayal of heroine Mrs. Brisby; the industrial and aesthetic hybridity of Bluth as a filmmaker caught between established animated traditions and formulae; connections between The Secret of NIMH and High Fantasy filmmaking of the period (including the work of counter-cultural animator Ralph Bakshi); and Bluth’s seismic impact on Disney animation and his influence on the studio’s subsequent shift in narrative during its ‘dark ages’ of the 1980s.