Trailer
Plot summary
Mrs. Brisby lives in a cinder block on the Fitzgibbons' farm with her children. Plowing time is near and she plans to move them, but her son Timothy has pneumonia, and Mr. Ages brings medicine and warns that the boy must rest indoors for three weeks. She meets Jeremy, a clumsy crow, and both narrowly escape the farm cat, Dragon. When the plowing starts early, Jeremy takes her to the Great Owl, who tells her that a colony of rats lives beneath the rose bush and that their leader, Nicodemus, may help. The rats know her late husband Jonathan, and Nicodemus explains that the rats and Jonathan were once the subjects of experiments at N.I.M.H., the National Institute of Mental Health, whose tests gave them human-like intelligence. The rats agree to move her home.
Cast
- Jodi Hicksas Cynthia (voice)
- Ian Friedas Timothy (voice)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Secret of NIMH (1982)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The heroine had to be renamed after Aurora told Bluth and company that Mrs. Frisby's name would have to be altered; the voice work was already recorded, and because John Carradine was unavailable for further recordings, editors took a "B" sound from another of his lines to replace the "F", turning Frisby into Brisby.
- Producer Gary Goldman recalled working 110-hour weeks during the final six months; the film cost $6.385 million, and Bluth, Goldman and Pomeroy and the executive producers at Aurora mortgaged their homes collectively for $700,000 to complete it, on the understanding that their investment would be repaid first.
- Distributor MGM/UA barely showed any interest in the film, so Aurora raised another $4,200,000 from private funding to pay for prints and the advertising campaign; the financiers had expected a wide release in 1,000 venues, but MGM opened it in 100 theaters, with its widest release only 700.
- Facing competition from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the film still performed better in those theaters alone in its opening week than Poltergeist, Rocky III, Firefox and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
- The Secret of NIMH was Don Bluth's directorial debut, based on Robert C. O'Brien's children's novel Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, and it featured Elizabeth Hartman in her final film role as the protagonist, Mrs. Brisby.
