Bright Rats, Bright Lights

By RICHARD CORLISS

THE SECRET OF NIMH Directed by Don Bluth Screenplay by Don Bluth, John Pomeroy, Gary Goldman and Will Finn

The Mr. Magoo cartoons were as simple and nearsighted as their subject. The Flintstones might just as well have been on radio. Ralph Bakshi seemingly made The Lord of the Rings with tracing paper and a Xerox machine. Now even the Disney organization is preoccupied with wooing the nation's video-game addicts over to its computer movie TRON. So it may be up to Bon Bluth to carry the torch of classical animation. Bluth would have it no other way. Like a conservative bishop fighting his church for abandoning the Latin Mass, Bluth left the Disney cartoon studio in 1979 believing that management was not living up to the animation ideals established some 40 years earlier by Uncle Walt. Soon 16 other Disney animators had joined him in his garage to affirm their faith in clarity of story line, subtlety of color and density of graphic detail. Now the Bluth Brigade has emerged with its first feature-length cartoon. It is something gorgeous to look at.

The sky is magnificently magenta; it glowers over the forest with flashing threats of lightning. You could count the night stars, the fireflies, the dewdrops, the hairs on a lady mouse's arm. The wisest, oldest owl peers omnisciently from his sepulcher of cobwebs. A clumsy crow trips over his own feet and executes a dazzling arabesque. Genius-IQ rats, escapees from deadly experiments at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), live in an underground palace as glimmering and precise as the Wizard's wonderful Oz. Our heroine, the lady mouse Mrs. Brisby, enlists the rats' aid to save her family from imminent death; she falls down a hole and into a world of effulgent psychedelia. The Bluth artists boast that more than 600 colors were used in the 1.5 million drawings that compose this 82-min. adventure. The eye of a Douanier Rousseau might discern each hue; others can simply open their eyes, and their mouths, in appreciative pleasure.

At times the graphic line comes close to obliterating the story line (from Robert C. O'Brien's Newbery Award-winning novel). Poor Mrs. Brisby and her rodent brood! If they do not pale in contrast to the sophisticated visuals, they are slipping out of the spotlight to make room for a chorus of scene stealers on both sides of the camera. Sullivan, a feline too mean for the Official I Hate Cats Book, is given the voice of gravel-garbling Aldo Ray. Someone finally found an apt role for ancient John Carradine: the basso voice of the Great Owl, fierce solon of the forest. Jeremy the Crow is a splendidly funny creation, all good will and ill wind, and Dom DeLuise speaks the part so perfectly that he deserves to become the first cartoon "voice" to be nominated for an acting Oscar.

There are a few longueurs, and moments when the plot trips, like Jeremy, over its own complications. Even here there are vagrant delights: a funny, scary chase scene, hints of death and resurrection, and enough sci-fi elements to keep teen-agers happy. But The Secret of NIMH is more important as Bon Bluth's declaration of dependence on a form of popular art that can infuse every corner of the imagination with its rainbow light. If Uncle Walt were to gaze on his renegade nephews, even he might approve.

--By Richard Corliss

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