Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH question (contains spoilers)

Cafe Society
1

First, let me say it’s been a while since I’ve read the book, so I might have just forgotten the answer to the question.

Anyway, to refresh everyone’s memory, Mrs. Frisby is a mouse who lives in a field in a farm with her children. Every spring, just before planting, they move somewhere else so they’ll be safe from the plows that tear up the field. Then one year, her son is seriously ill, and can’t be moved. To save him, Mrs. Frisby goes to the colony of rats who live in a rosebush on the farm. These aren’t ordinary rats, though. They’re lab rats that have escaped from a NIMH lab, where experiments were conducted on them to give them human level intelligence, and they live in fear that the government will find out about them. The rats owe Mrs. Frisby a favor because her, now dead, husband, was also given superintelligence by NIMH, and was with the rats when they escaped. Of course, by the end of the book, the rats figure out how to save Mrs. Frisby’s family and convince the humans that they’re dead, and it all ends happily.

So here’s my question. The rats, we’re told in the book, have human intelligence because of the experiments done on them. This also explains the intelligence level of the (now deceased) Mr. Frisby, along with another mouse, named Mr. Ages, who is the one to tell Mrs. Frisby to go to the rats. Mr. Ages was also an escaped experiment. The other animals in the book, including Mrs. Frisby, we assume, have ordinary intelligence for their species.

Except, of course, they don’t, because if they did, it would be a really boring book. Mrs. Frisby has to be smart enough, in the book, to realize ahead of time when the plows are going to come, has to realize her son is too sick to travel, has to convince the rats to help her, and so on. These are all things that a human being would know and plan for, but not that an average mouse would.

Normally in a book like this, there wouldn’t be a problem. A lot of fantasy books have anthropomorphic animals, and you just have to accept that the animals of Redwall go on adventures and fight evil weasels, or that the rabbits of Watership Down have their own religion and myths. Accepting that is a natural precondition to the story.

But in this case, where intelligence plays a major part of the story, is it ever explained just how Mrs. Frisby got so smart?

2

Well its been years since I read the book or saw the movie, but I believe that a certain level of intelligence in ALL the animals, not just the ones escaped from the lab, is assumed. Therefore Mrs. Frisby, the Owl and others can makes plans and have more complex relationships than we would normally expect from animals. It is the rats understanding of engineering , machinery, electricity etc, that sets them apart from the rest of the animal world. The other animals still have to live like animals, but the rats develop the technology to live more like people.

3

No. It’s simply a conceit of the anthropomorphic animal world.

4

Yes.

I am only posting because I hope this discussion takes off. I would love to read a Dope discussion of NIMH.

5

Jonathan Frisby also taught his wife some basic reading skills IIRC, so it’s not that the other animals are dumb, they simply lack education. How education would be passed along in a lab setting using injections is a different problem.

6

The book also mentions, I believe, that the children, Timothy in particular, are more intelligent than their mother, although not quite so intelligent as Jonathan. It’s hinted that there is a genetic component to whatever N.I.M.H. did to Jonathan, and that his offspring benefited (?) from it as well.

The thing I was never clear on was the POV of the book. Was it a good thing that the animals were abnormally smart, or was it a tragic thing? Obviously the rats (and Jonathan and Ages) were not happy being experimented on, but OTOH, they did have nice cushy lives and the ability to save poor pneumonia ridden mice as a result. “The Plan” seems to indicate that Nickodemus, at least, would prefer an idyllic natural life without great intelligence (and the movie adds in some moral tale about Stealing to bolster his platform), but obviously there’s resistance to that. There seemed to be far more ambiguity and less black and what moralizing in this book than many “children’s” books.

I haven’t re-read this one in years. I think it’s time again.

My apologies if I’m conflating the book and the movie in that middle paragraph. Like I said, it’s been a while.

7

Really, the mice knowing when the tractors would come is not a lot different from birds migrating each year, or fish returning to breed at the site of their conception. The truly weird thing about it is that Ms. Frisby even cares that her son isn’t well- it’s not like she can’t have 20 million more just like him, so why not just leave him behind? :smiley:

While I think that we’re meant to assume a good deal of intelligence on the part of the “non-NIMH” animals, we’re also told that Jonathan had taught Ms. Frisby a good bit as well- for instance, she knew how to read a little (though ISTR she commented that her kids were better at it). So perhaps he taught her diplomacy and logic as well?

8

Wasn’t her surname “Brisby” in the movie? It’s been so long since I’ve seen it that I might be misremembering.

9

Know what’s weird? My boyfriend and I argued the hell out of that just last night! It’s Brisby in the movie, changed from Frisby in the book.

10

Yes. They changed it to something they thought sounded better. Something about the hard “b” instead of a scratchy “frrrr”.

11

I smell Wham-O.

12

I’ve never read the book. Did it have an evil villain and a magic ending?

13

Allow me to say: huh?

14

Wham-O makes frisbees…excuse me…Frisbee[tm] brand flying disks. I believe Otto suspects that Wham-O took steps to protect their trademark when NIMH went from relatively obscure (though good) book to major Don Bluth animated motion picture. Thus the name change.

15

No. In the movie, the villian was Jenner, I think. In the book, Jenner was the leader of a group of dissident rats whose death led to NIMH becoming aware of the rats. (The leader of the rats, Nicodemus was afraid that if they kept stealing from humans, they’d be caught, and was planning on moving the colony to an unsettled area where they could build their own civilization without human help. Jenner said, “Hey, we’re rats. Being vermin and stealing from humans is just what we do!”, and his followers left the rosebush. They were all electrocuted by accident when they were stealing an electric motor from a store, which led NIMH to realize that there were intelligent rats out there, and let them track them down.)

As for the ending, the rats used pullies to move the house, and then escaped to Thorn Valley before NIMH showed up to gas the rosebush, with the exception of a few who stayed behind as martyrs because they knew that NIMH would be expecting to find dead rats.

16

Aaaaah, that makes sense. I remember the “it sounds better” explanation from a making of docu-ad played on HBO or Showtime way back in the day. But the Wham-O one might be the real reason, and the other just spin.

17

Also, regarding Jenner, from what I remember of the movie, Jenner comes across much better in the book, by the way. In the book, he’s a friend of Nicodemus’s from before they were first captured by NIMH, and it’s him, along with Justin and Nicodemus, who plan the escape from NIMH and lead the rest of the rats to freedom. He’s not the sinister brutal villian he is in the movie.

And Wikipedia agrees about the reason for the Frisby/Brisby change, btw

18

Yep. I clicked through on their cite and found this article (book?) by someone named John Cowley

A portion reads:

19

I know. The movie made him really dark.

The movie was freaky, too. Scared me when I was a kid.

I don’t think the book had much on the medallian, either, did it? Whereas in the movie it was terribly magical.

And what about the crow Jeremy? He was thoroughly ridiculous in the movie, and in the book a good friend. Also the kids were really annoying in the movie.

20

Heh. Spin.

I was just making a joke, BTW. I had no idea I was right.