Loved this movie as a kid, even if I didn’t understand most of the plot. Watched it again and I wondered about some things(I have not read the book).
We never meet Johnathon, the father of the kids since he is dead, but they don’t appear any more intelligent then the rats who actually escaped from the National Institute of Mental Health, or the rats who never got the injections. Are we to believe that er the chemical whatever it is was passed in uh semen or hereditary lines?
Watching it as an adult the mixture of scifi and fantasy was kind of odd, as a kid the meaning of NIMH and the scifi elements went over my head and I just thought of it as a fantasy animal movie like Watership Down.
I thought the same. I watched it when the DVD came out, the first time since I saw it as a kid on original release, and I had no memory of the plot. It’s weird combination of pure fantasy, magic and anthropomorphic animals, and the science of animal experimentation is an odd thing to juxtapose. I’m not sure if they succeeded. I’ve never read the book, either.
I don’t follow your question as it seems to contradict itself. If, as you say, Jonathan Frisby’s children are no more intelligent than “normal” rats/mice, that would imply that whatever advantage Jonathan and the other rats had was NOT passed down to later generations. Having said that, I seem to remember the book mentioning that one of the really remarkable things about the rats of NIMH was that their children, grandchildren etc DID in fact have greater intelligence than average, contrary to what might be expected. But it’s never explained what the mechanism for that might be, so I think you’re probably overanalysing - it’s a fun children’s book, not meant to be scientifically plausible (or even internally consistent), like the best sci-fi really should be.
I actually haven’t seen the film, but I can recommend the book - I have re-read it as an adult and still find it a good read. There were also two sequels which are worth reading too, if not quite as good as the original.
Dead Cat is right: the smartness and initiative is strongly suggested to be passed down to the children, and if I recall correctly, that knowledge adds to the lure of escape - the potential to continue as a colony of better/faster/stronger/smarter rodentia.
The sequels actually get further into the “science” of their inherited smartness, and even start to delve into rodent eugenics regarding pure bloodlines and intermarriage and etc.
They’re not even remotely scientifically specific, but I always thought of them as science fiction. They’re no more hand-wavey than a random episode of Star Trek, for example, with mystical alien impregnations and magical tesseracty time-warps and evil clones.
I haven’t seen the movie but read the book, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, a number of times as a child. I remember that one of the mice children, the sickly one, was smarter.
I still think about those rats in the rosebush, with their carpet and electricity.
Ugh that was my fault, let me rephrase my contradictory question.
Why do Mrs. Brisby and her children seem just as smart as(they are even able to read even Mrs Birsby) the rats injected with the mystery drug at NIMH? And even rats with 0 association with NIMH or in a close relationship or descended from NIMH rats seemed comparably intelligent.
I guess what I was asking was they build up this NIMH thing, but they don’t seem smarter than non NIMH rats.
EDIT:It just occurred to me the NIMH rats wear clothes and shoes, including the kids, but Mrs. Brisby only wears a cape and is otherwise naked. But then I remembered others not from NIMH who wore clothes.
Its a very weird movie. The book (Mrs. Frisbee and the Rats of NIMH) does not have any supernatural element. In the book ALL the rats who are Mrs. Fribee’s neighbors are NIMH escapees and use electricity and other forms of science. They want to form a farming collective and build their own generators instead of tapping human electricity. It’s very obvious they are more intelligent that your average rat.
I always hated the movie. It takes something sciencey and amazing and makes it supernatural and lame.
My perception, from having read the book (recently – I read it to my son a few months ago) but not the movie, is that the animals in general are Watership Down smart, normally. They avoid the cat with more forethought than would be expected of a mouse or bird in our world, and the bird (I forgot his name) saved the mouse and gave her a ride home on his back.
The smart injections just make them extra smart. For example, Mrs. Frisby is just a regular lady mouse, but her husband taught her to read and impressed on her the importance of reading and teaching their children to read. So apparently, normal mice in that world are capable of learning to read, it just takes a medically enhanced super genius mouse to convince them to do so.
The injections just turned already smart animals, who could (if motivated) learn to read and ride birds and ask owls about how to save their sick child, into a team of engineers who could build complex architecture and splice into the electric grid. EDIT: I forgot there was a moral element to the medicine. The rats were no longer content to eat garbage and steal other animals’ food, and decided to farm their own food and generate their own electricity. Sort of like “hey, now I understand why people hate rats so much. We’re just a bunch of dirty thieves! Let’s fix that…”
I believe they had to do it after the fact as well. In other words they recorded the entire voice track saying “Frisby” and then later when they couldn’t get the rights to use the name they had to go back and have every actor who said it re-record it as “Brisby”.
Another bit of trivia: In a very early role Shannon Doherty does the voice of one of Mrs. Brisby’s daughters!
Regardless of its flaws (and I don’t think it has many) The Secret of NIMH is a significant film in animation history being it came about because of the horrible state of the animation dept at Disney by the late 70s. Don Bluth was a Disney animator, so he and a group of others essentially 'rebelled ’ and quit and formed a separate company to make the kind of films they felt Disney should be making. *NIMH *was the result. And even though I believe the Bluth company went bankrupt after it, it attracted the attention of people like Spielberg who hired them to produce An American Tail, which led to Roger Rabbit, which led to the whole renaissance of animation by the late 80s (Tiny Toons, Animaniacs etc.)
It was also a wake call for Disney and resulted in Eisner & Katzenberg taking over and saving the company with the likes of The Little Mermaid, Alladin, The Lion King etc.
Thanks, I had forgotten those extra details. And I agree with your analysis of the “sci-fi” element - I just said the best sci-fi is perhaps better-explained than your average Star Trek episode (no offence intended to any Trekkies!).
Ah yes, I’d forgotten that, too. Although my memory of it is that the sickly child’s pronouncements were presented more as prophecies or soothsaying than high intelligence (though I suppose at a certain level the two could be indistinguishable). I don’t think it’s made clear whether this is due to his heritage or is a entirely separate matter.
I agree with DrCube’s excellent analysis on this one. Mrs (F/B)risby is clearly less intelligent than her children and the rats, but with their help she is able to learn to read, albeit not as well as them. But descendants of the original NIMH rats and mice (or mouse, in fact) do have enhanced innate intelligence.
I’m not sure it was “a moral element to the medicine”, but it was certainly a moral element to the story. In other words, I don’t think the medicine given at NIMH made the rats more moral as such, it simply increased their intelligence such that they then discovered morality. I didn’t necessarily pick up on it as a child, but now I read the book as an allegory for the human race using their increased intelligence to make life more comfortable for themselves, but at the cost of “stealing” from the lifeforms we share the planet with.
The injections definitely didn’t make them more moral - remember, Jenner wanted to continue to steal. The other rats decided they didn’t want to anymore. So possibly they were given the human-like self-awareness to decide they wanted something else by the injections, but they weren’t automatically made more moral. (And it’s not as if we don’t see “normal” animals doing things like risking their lives for their children, or helping other species, in the book.)
Just reread this one a few months ago and it’s so good - kind of alarming for some kids, though, I’d imagine. Pretty dark.
I saw the movie and read the book as a kid and loved both, but I don’t remember all the details. What were the supernatural elements that were added to the film?
In the movie, the rat leader Nicodemus is a mystic with telekinetic powers… In the book, he’s just a supersmart rat with some socialist inclinations. More central to the plot is a lame magical amulet given to Mrs. B, that helps you with magical power if you’re brave. And no, it’s not the “the power was inside you all along” thing. The amulet definitely does swirly sparkly magic – in the climax of the film Mrs. B uses its magical forces to levitate her house.
Oh right, I remember that now. Thanks, ** Hello Again**. In the book, they just had to delay the plowing of the field long enough to move the family to a new house the lee of the stone (and get past a cat doing so), right? I remember learning the word “lee” from that book.
I never actually read the book, but when I first saw the movie on HBO I thought it sounded like a story I had heard before. Turns out I saw it on an episode of the great PBS show Cover to Cover with John Robbins in the late 70s. It was that show where he’d introduce a young adult book and then draw a scene from it while a narrator read the scene. I remembered that the character was originally called Mrs. Frisby on that show…