In The Secret of NIMH (1982) we are handed an intriguing scenario – animals made intelligent through the experimentation of man – who find themselves in a precarious situation – man is now a menace, both knowingly and unknowingly – with some good, if perhaps slightly one-dimensional characters, and they’re set loose to follow their destinies.
Sadly, in the end anything they might do is ultimately meaningless because there’s magic in the air, the magic that can overwhelm any evil, all because a simple mother mouse is “pure of heart”. The tension builds as the good guys suffer loss after loss, and keep struggling – but those struggles become meaningless because magic saves them, rather than their own efforts, intelligence, loyalty, or any other quality we might deem to be a positive in a culture. A deux ex machina magic unprecedented in the film, unless one considers a flying, glowing book or two to be a sufficient hint that magic might be employed to solve problems.
Not that I object to magic, but it must follow dramatic rules so that the audience doesn’t feel cheated when it comes to the rescue. Often it exacts a price, either in energy or through some loss of something else. In this story, after all the effort to put the rats to the test of saving members of another species, magic comes through, with no contribution of there’s theirs’, to save the day.
A disappointing denouement to what was an otherwise promising, if rough, directorial debut by Don Bluth.
