1972: MRS. FRISBY AND THE RATS OF NIMH by Robert C. O'Brien with illustrations by Zena Bernstein
Mrs. Frisby, the head of a family of field mice, lived in an underground house in the vegetable garden of a farmer named Mr. Fitzgibbon.
In an earlier essay, we touched upon an infamous 1985 Disney animated film called The Black Cauldron, which, for various reasons, bombed at the box office and almost sank the animation division at the studio, which was eventually able to recover with the twin successes of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and The Great Mouse Detective and head into the absurd critical and commercial hot streak of Disney's second golden age.
One of the reasons for Black Cauldron's failure that we didn't touch on was that, early in the film's animation process, some of Disney's most talented and most established animators - guys who really believed in traditional hand-drawn animation and felt that Disney was abandoning it for this CGI stuff - left the studio to start their own rival company. Don Bluth, who led the exodus and founded the first iteration of Don Bluth Entertainment in 1979, and got hooked up with big Hollywood names like Kathleen Kennedy, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas. While almost all of Bluth's animated films for the next two decades were commercially underwhelming, many of them became VHS cult classics for weird kids, since most of Bluth's films were two degrees too dark and unsettling for kids raised on The Little Mermaid or Pocahontas. All Dogs Go To Heaven was literally about a dog murdered by the New Orleans Dog Mafia, who then escapes the afterlife and risks condemning himself to Dog Hell. An American Tail is about an adorable anthropomorphic mouse, but it's also a metaphor for the Jewish diaspora since little Fievel Mouskewitz is actually escaping an anti-Mousitic attack from the cats in his native country. The Land Before Time had multiple scenes cut so kids wouldn't leave the theater screaming, resulting in continuity gaps during the fight scenes with the Sharptooth1. Rock-A-Doodle was a (very) loose adaptation of Rostand's Chanteceler and was about an evil owl who wanted to stop the sun from rising so he convinced a rooster to go into show business and then the rooster became a washed-up-late-period-Elvis-type rocker whose spirit had been broken so badly that he refused to crow and raise the sun. That was a real movie! It premiered in Indianapolis! My wife went to it as a kid! Ironically (well, maybe it's not ironic at all), Bluth's biggest commercial success was his film that stayed the closest to the Disney-princess-musical formula, 1997's Anastasia with Meg Ryan and John Cusack, although the bad guy was the reanimated and decaying corpse of Rasputin, so we still have some of that darkness there2.
If Bluth's main goal was to preserve high standards of classical hand-drawn animation, he certainly succeeded in the short term. There's no question that the Bluth films were gorgeous and lush and detailed in a way that stood in sharp contrast to the more half-assed contemporary Disney entries like Oliver And Company; in 1982, the year that Bluth put out his first film, Disney couldn’t even get a new animated feature out the door, and instead theatrically re-released Fantasia, Peter Pan, Robin Hood, and Bambi at various points in the year3. If Bluth's main goal was to surpass Disney commercially in the long term, though, that didn't happen, because Disney realized pretty quickly that he could be a threat, redoubled their efforts on animation, hired Alan Menken and Howard Ashman to write what would become some of the best show tunes of the century, and cranked out The Little Mermaid and Beauty And The Beast and Aladdin and The Lion King in consecutive years, laying the groundwork for some truly disappointing live-action remakes 25 years later. But Bluth also told very complex and dark stories, more complex and darker than any of the four smash Disney movies I just listed. And whether or not he pulled off translating these stories for a young audience is, in my opinion, kind of an open question. The plots of these films are complicated, byzantine things that need the audience to understand the specific rules that condemn a dog to Dog Hell. You need to understand that Fievel is being forced to flee his country because of his, uh, mouse ethnicity, in a movie that doesn't really connect all of the dots for you and is apparently hoping you'll have an uncomfortable conversation with your parents once you get out of the theater. Hopefully, from reading these essays, you've taken away that I think kids can handle dark and complex stuff if you present it to them properly. But when I say things like that, I'm talking about the loser kids like me who spent all of their time in the library, not the much larger swath of kids going to the movie theater. These movies opened against flashier stuff with princesses and sweeping "I Want" tunes, and Bluth was taking very big risks in terms of trusting an audience of children to go along with some that could scare and/or confuse them.
Bluth's first animated film was The Secret Of NIMH, based on the 1972 Newbery medalist.
The Secret of NIMH4 was dark in the way that every Bluth film is at least a little dark, but believe it or not, it’s a more lighthearted version of the actual novel Mrs. Frisby And The Rats Of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien. The movie has a magic amulet that gives Mrs. Frisby/Brisby superpowers and the head rat, Nicodemus, is also a wizard. The book does not have magic in it, but you get something almost as good as magic or Dom DeLuise’s voice acting: a child dying of pneumonia.
The central conflict of NIMH is that Mrs. Frisby’s son Timothy has fallen ill, which is a huge problem for the family of field mice, led by their widow mother, who need to move their home quickly before the thaw starts and Farmer Fitzgibbon starts plowing the field again. Desperately searching for anyone who can help her and her family, Mrs. Frisby is directed to a colony of rats living under the rosebush. And that’s where things start to get weird.
The animals in NIMH can talk to each other in the way that animals can usually talk to each other in children’s novels, but are otherwise, you know, animals. They live in fields and trees and bushes and they eat what they find on the ground. Like animals would. But the rats have developed civilization, built a fully electrified underground city, they can read and write English, and have almost completed the establishment of a full agricultural ecology and economic system. Believe it or not, this is not the part where it gets weird. The weird part is how they got there.
The rats of NIMH were lab rats at the National Institute for Mental Health, and were the subject of experiments by human scientists that ended up giving them superintelligence and unnatural longevity. The lab scientists expected them to get smarter, and actually taught the rats to read, but never foresaw that the rats would become smart enough to coordinate an escape from the lab altogether. Which, to be fair, is kind of on them for not anticipating something like that.
Weirdly, NIMH does not appear to be a story about the dangers of animal laboratory testing in the same way that, like, Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest was5. NIMH is about something nice and simple, something every child loves reading about: whether civilization is good or actually a curse that will destroy our souls.
When Mrs. Frisby comes knocking on the door of the rats’ nest, she finds them walking upright and storing food and, more importantly, writing something on a blackboard labeled “THE PLAN”. As it turns out, the rats have also been building plows and getting ready to grow their own food, because THE PLAN is to “live without stealing, of course. That’s the whole idea.” Nicodemus leads the rat colony, and he commandeers long stretches of the novel to narrate, in the first person, the rats’ escape from the NIMH labs and what their ultimate goals are. It’s heavy stuff:
“The reading we did!...What I liked best was history. I read about the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks and Romans, and the Dark Ages, when the old civilizations fell apart and the only people who could read and write were the monks. They lived apart in monasteries. The led the simplest kind of lives, and studied and wrote; they grew their own food, built their own houses and furniture. They even made their own tools and their own paper. Reading about that, I began getting some ideas of how we might live…We did find a few things. There were two sets of encyclopedias that had sections on rats. From them we learned that we were about the most hated animals on earth, except maybe snakes and germs. That seemed strange to us, and unjust. Especially when we learned that some of our close cousins - squirrels, for instance, and rabbits - were well liked. But people think we spread diseases, and I suppose possibly we do, though never intentionally, and surely we never spread as many diseases as people themselves do. Still, it seemed to us that the main reason we were hated must be that we always lived by stealing. From the earliest times, rats lived around the edges of human cities and farms, stowed away on men’s ships, gnawed holes in their floors and stole their food. Sometimes we were accused of biting human children; I didn’t believe that, nor did any of us - unless it was some kind of a subnormal rat, bred in the worst of city slums. And that, of course, can happen to people, too.”
There is, to make a huge understatement, a lot in here. The rats want civilization. But nobody likes them. Because they have to steal from human society to survive. But sometimes they also bite people. But they only bite people because society has left them behind. But if they isolate themselves and live like monks, they can become something greater. Nicodemus’ monologue goes on from here, about how rats are smart enough to build their own civilization, even without brain-enhancing drugs, but whatever it would be would look very different from human civilization. But was human civilization all that good to begin with?
“I was reminded of a story I had read at the Boniface Estate when I was looking for things written about rats. It was about a woman in a small town who bought a vacuum cleaner. Her name was Mrs. Jones, and up until then she, like all of her neighbors, had kept her house spotlessly clean by using a broom and a mop. But the vacuum cleaner did it faster and better, and soon Mrs. Jones was the envy of all the other housewives in town - so they bought vacuum cleaners, too. The vacuum cleaner business was so brisk, in fact, that the company that made them opened a branch factory in the town. The factory used a lot of electricity, of course, and so did the women with their vacuum cleaners, so the local electric power company had to put up a big new plant to keep them all running. In its furnaces the power plant burned coal, and out of its chimneys black smoke poured day and night, blanketing the town with soot and making all the floors dirtier than ever. Still, by working twice as hard and twice as long, the women of the town were able to keep their floors almost as clean as they had been before Mrs. Jones ever bought a vacuum cleaner in the first place. The story was part of a book of essays, and the reason I had read it so eagerly was that it was called “The Rat Race” - which, I learned, means a race where, no matter how fast you run, you don’t get anywhere. But there was nothing in the book about rats, and I felt bad about the title because, I thought, it wasn’t a rat race at all, it was a People Race, and no sensible rats would ever do anything so foolish.”
Okay, so parents reading this passage to their children might be setting themselves up for some difficult questions, like “is all of human society actually a prison?” or “have the Industrial Revolution and its consequences actually been a disaster for the human race?” I actually enjoyed Mrs. Frisby And The Rats Of NIMH a great deal; it moves quickly, there are some very exciting plot twists after Mrs. Frisby gets drafted into taking on a very important task for the rats, and the stakes are always worryingly high. But most importantly, this book starts to introduce children to tough questions about what a good society, what a good civilization, should actually look like, and what we can aspire to be, in terms of a society where we don’t exploit or hurt each other, or tie ourselves into knots inventing things that just make us more miserable. These are hard questions; adults can’t answer them, but children who get exposed to them can someday explore the contours of a world that is much bigger than most people assume. That’s a very noble thing that NIMH achieves as a novel, but holy crap this wouldn’t work in a children’s animated movie that was supposed to compete with Disney, and yeah, I get why Don Bluth rewrote parts of the story to go with “Nicodemus is a wizard and Mrs. Brisby has a magic amulet that gives her super-strength”. And I absolutely get why a family would want to see the re-release of the Disney Robin Hood instead.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will arrive in January.
This is also almost exactly what happened to The Black Cauldron.
For reasons of space, I've omitted films like A Troll In Central Park and The Pebble And The Penguin, from what I would consider Bluth's "pure dogshit era".
Although theatrical re-releases were more common in this era. Hell, Disney still had another run of Song Of The South in them; they put it in theaters again in 1986 - 1986! - and also that happened to be the highest-grossing run for a film that nobody is allowed to watch anymore.
The title of the film was changed from that of the novel to avoid legal headbutting with Wham-O, the makers of the Frisbee toy. Mrs. Frisby’s name was changed to Mrs. Brisby in the film. Of course, the legal conflict all happened after all of the dialogue was recorded in the film, which meant that all of the actors had to go back in and ADR their lines again with the new character name, except John Carradine, who wasn’t available, so the editors had to cut and paste “b” sounds from elsewhere in his dialogue. That’s Hollywood baby.
Fern Gully seems like it would be a Bluth film, but it wasn't. We're Back: A Dinosaur Story, a movie in which John Goodman is a singing T-Rex and Jay Leno is a parasaurolophus and Walter Cronkite is the kindly professor who takes them in, is also not a Bluth film, the screenplay for that one is by - and I swear this is true, you can look it up - John Patrick Shanley, the Pulitzer-winning playwright who also wrote Doubt.