Hacker Cinema
The Secret of NIMH
1982 · Film · 83 min
Directed by Don Bluth
AdventureAnimationFamilyFantasyMysteryScience Fiction
A widowed field mouse must move her family -- including an ailing son -- to escape a farmer's plow. Aided by a crow and a pack of superintelligent, escaped lab rats, the brave mother struggles to transplant her home to firmer ground.
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22 comments on Hacker News
I grew up with both Miyazaki and Bluth films.
I love Secret of NIMH, All Dogs Go To Heaven, etc. but let's not whitewash over history. He also did "A Troll in Central Park".
For every mediocre movie like Earthsea, there's also fantastic movies like Porco Rosso, Spirited Away, Naussica, etc - all of which I watched as a "kid".
They both had their highs and lows. Seems rather pointless to try and bench them against each other.
There's a whole book and movie about it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_NIMH
- The Thin Red Line.
The narative structure is hard to get the first time you watch the movie, but once you get it, it can change the way you see (the/our) nature.
- The Secret of NIMH.
Saw it the first time at 4 or 5 and was in awe, but it tooks several more years to understand it fully.
- The Truman Show.
It's basically my life.
- Akira.
No particular reason, except it's the first Manga which gets international recognition and propulsed the industry in the grown-up domain.
I glanced at the headline and thought, oh kinda random but it’ll be neat to see what Don Bluth thinks of ChatGPT. After all, Secret of Nimh was such a great movie!
No offense, but it's amazing to me the appeal of something like this wouldn't be clearly evident given the time it was released. That game and other similar QTE types of that era give me chills whenever I see one in an arcade still. It seemed like something out of the future. It's one of those things of that era so vibrant that it goes hand in hand with things like ET or Thriller as being especially exciting and memorable.
Part of it was the Secret of Nimh connection... unsure if the film was a huge success, but it definitely left a mark on that period of time. To have a game in that animation style, with a hilarious premise, incredible sound system, etc, was a complete sensory overload against the pixellated mess that surrounded it.
I remember seeing it the first time during summer of '83 on a family trip to Vegas. They carved out a section with a platform in the middle arcade at the Flamingo Hilton, there must have been 50 people just watching whomever was playing it.
From what I recall it was also the first game to cost 50 cents, and you would have to wait an hour or more in line for the honor maybe during the first few months if your arcade was so lucky to have a machine. I remember the first I was able to play it without waiting, must have been around Christmas that year.
I think this is a good point. I distinctly recall the Secret of Nimh connection... unsure if the film was a huge success, but it definitely left a mark on that period of time. So to to see a game in that animation style, with a hilarious premise, incredible sound system, etc, it was overwhelming.
I remember seeing it the summer of '83 on a family trip to Vegas. They carved out a section with a platform in the middle arcade at the Flamingo Hilton, there must have been 50 people just watching whomever was playing it. It seemed like pure magic.
It's almost completely gone in the US on Netflix also. I've had better luck watching older movies on Youtube 'Free with Ads' service, especially 80s and 90s movies, than I've had on Netflix. And there's no ads if you get Youtube's premium service (I currently don't, but don't mind the ads).
Currently on there is Wrongfully Accused (funny Leslie Nielsen movie), Glengarry Glen Ross, Robocop (1987), Ghost in the Shell, The Mask, License to Drive, The Neverending Story, Tombstone, Leon The Professonal, The Amityville Horror, Over the Top (some Stallone movie), Miracle on 34th Street, Con Air, Edward Scissorhands, Gone Fishin', Look Who's Talking, While You Were Sleeping, The Craft, Red Dawn, So I Married an Axe Murderer, Secret of Nimh, Killer Klowns from Outer Space, Revenge of the Pink Panther, Mad Max, Das Boot, Little Shop of Horrors, Hackers, .... okay, I'm just going to stop now, but t keeps going, I'm only a third of the way though the list.
Watership Down and the Secret of Nimh were my two favorite movies as a young child in the early 80s, followed closely by the Dark Crystal and maybe Aristocats and the Black Hole.
Other movies of the time like the Rescuers and the Fox and the Hound and Labyrinth and such were a disappointment compared to these...
Check out Youtube's Free with Ads movies. Seriously. They've got a good selection of great movies (especially comedies) from the 80s and 90s on there.
Naked Gun series, Oh Brother Where Art Thou?, Raising Arizona, Idiocracy, The Terminal, Major League, Top Secret!, Hot Shots!, Beavis and Butthead Do America, The Terminator, Delirious, Robin Hood Men in Tights, Captain Ron (crap, it's not free anymore), original Robocop, Secret of Nimh, Ghost, I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, Silence of the Lambs, Teen Wolf, to name a few.
It's a smaller selection and they don't seem to stay Free for more than a few months, so you have to keep checking it, but there's some good stuff on there.
This reminds me of "The Secret of NIMH" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084649/
Awesome bit of trivia hidden in that very interesting Wiki page:
> Calhoun's work with rats inspired the 1971 children's book, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, by Robert C. O'Brien, which was adapted into a 1982 animated film, The Secret of NIMH.
Calhoun did his work on rats/mice at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).
Watership Down, Secret of Nimh, and The Dark Crystal were probably the most influential films of my childhood. It would be a terrible loss for any of them to be recategorized away from children.
If you didn't grow up with Bluth's work and only know his studio's output from the later years (the unyielding torrent of direct to video Land Before Time sequels)...you really owe it to yourself to watch his studio's earlier stuff. It came at the moment where he had just struck off from Disney, disenfranchised by the output of the other major animation houses, and has his clearest vision.
The Secret of NIMH is, IMHO, one of the finest animated movies ever made, but An American Tail, the original Land Before Time and All Dogs Go to Heaven are all masterpieces in the own and couldn't really be matched in terms of narrative and animation excellence until the early Pixar movies. They definitely have a distinct aesthetic and a certain style of animation and storytelling unique to the production house.
They lost their way somewhere, I think it was Rock-a-Doodle, and the studio just started hemorrhaging money and losing connection with their audience. Their last two major gasps were Anastasia, a beautifully animated film with a poorly targeted audience demographic and Titan A.E., an ambition mixed-media project, which apparently ran out of money (among other problems) during production and resulted in some hilariously bad computer generated graphics at the end but I think stands up better than Disney's Treasure Planet response.
In the end, the studio floated themselves on cheaply produced, but child friendly, direct to video sequels of The Land Before Time, which is notable as being an unbroked series of sequels dating from 1988 to 2016 which at least has had the advantage of being a series of characters I can share with nieces and nephews who also grew up with the same characters...almost like Star Wars.
I do like the film, but it was a bit heavy for me as a youngster (the murder part).
Stressful, like The Secret of Nimh.
This reminds me of the movie Secret of Nimh.
Even if you're a staunch ally of safe, conservative family entertainment for its own sake, Disney was pretty damn crappy for a while. Look at their animated stuff in particular for plenty of mediocre storylines and bland animation (e.g. The Aristocats, The Fox and the Hound, Robin Hood). Children deserved better!
Eventually some meaningful competition from the likes of Don Bluth started to push them in the right direction (Secret of NIMH, Land before Time, All Dogs Go to Heaven, etc.) and not too long afterward they were doing things like Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin. Quite an improvement, though I dare say the storylines have never quite caught up. (Of course, all of Bluth's stuff would later be undermined as it was sequel-ized to Hell and back, like The Land Before Time XXIV: Teach Your Kids Roman Numerals Edition...)
Right now, though, after seeing Pixar's homages to Ghibli, I'm anticipating the impact of recent works like Puella Magi Madoka Magica, which really pushed some boundaries in Japan. (If you're not familiar with it, I'll just say... imagine if Pan's Labyrinth had been actively marketed to little children as a happy family film and an homage to Alice in Wonderland... and then translate that willful deception and the profound darkness onto Sailor Moon.) If it does make a splash in the youth entertainment industry at large, that will be quite interesting indeed.
This immediately makes me think of "secret of nimh" - loved this movie when I was growing up.
Reminds of of one of my childhood favorites:
book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Frisby_and_the_Rats_of_NIMH
movie: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_NIMH
Glad to see it. Sure, names don't really mean all that much in the final run; influential brands tend to cancel out pre-existing negative connotations (see: Git). But for nascent projects like Nim, a name with pre-existing connotations can be a burden, and a cool name can give a useful boost.
Of course, what I think when I see Nim now is The Secret of NIMH: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084649/reference.
Great story, never got the chance to play Dragon's Lair on the arcade, but I did get to play Space Ace, the art/animation was amazing as one would expect from Don Bluth, particularly from that era when he did his (imo) finest work in the form of Secret of Nimh, but the simplistic game play mechanics left me disappointed.
As I recall, Don Bluth saw these laser games as simply a means to raise funds for his true love, animated feature films, meanwhile the producer Rick Dyer was truly passionate about the laserdisc game format and spent pretty much every penny of his Dragon's Lair and Space Ace earnings on his ill-fated Halcyon project.
Why did the film adaptation of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH into The Secret of NIMH rewrite the end plot with that stupid mystical jewel-locket-thing?
They pretty much rewrote the entire premise of the book. It was originally about lab rats who acquired human-level intelligence from experiments, and then had to rapidly build a civilization from scratch. Disnification turned it into some typical magical talking animal thing.
Interesting.
The nice thing about the Orwell review for me is that by explicitly talking about the atomic bomb and spelling it out for me in that context, it led me to an understanding of a lot of other cultural output (especially film) over the next few decades. Star Trek IV? Oh, that space probe that's out to destroy the world is a symbol for the atomic bomb. (I had some help from the boombox quip about how "we'll all be crispy critters after WORLD WAR III.") Blade Runner? Is about living with the expectation your life could end tomorrow. Aliens? Is about the destruction of civilization. And it's not just hardcore sci-fi. Why did the film adaptation of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH into The Secret of NIMH rewrite the end plot with that stupid mystical jewel-locket-thing? Besides the fact that it's more cinematic, perhaps the director was pondering the promise and perils of science, especially atomic weapons and atomic energy. Flippin' Rock-a-doodle? I'm thinking 'nuclear winter'.
You just don't get that same flavor with things produced after the mid-eighties.