Il segreto di NIMH 2: Timmy alla riscossa

As other reviews have noticed, this flick is a slap in the face of those of us who loved the original movie as kids. The animation is truly Saturday-morning level, and I was cringing every time a familiar character popped in -- they had been stripped of whatever edginess they had previously possessed and given voices that grate harshly on the ears of long-time fans. The songs were painful and completely inappropriate every single time, and the story was just plain dumb. I am a camp counselor for kids aged 6 to 10, and even they hated the movie. Parents, please don't subject your kids to this drivel, and fans of the original, don't even think of even picking up the box to this shameful waste of time.

The Secret of NIMH was one of the best kid's movies ever. It disturbed and frightened me as a kid in the way a good fairy tale does (or the way adult movies disturb and frighten adults in on a different scale), because it makes you think about big issues, but in a way that kids can still learn from and love to watch. The sequel, wow, it was pretty bad. The animation quality was okay, not as good as the original but not horrible, but the story went the way of a mediocre afternoon TV cartoon. They added a few cartoony characters for comic effect, including a caterpillar and two cats, who could talk although it was never explained how since they had never been experimented on by NIMH. They turned it into a Disneyesque musical, with a song every 10 or 20 minutes. One character switches from an American to a British accent in the middle of the film for no reason. It's not scary in the least, not like the original, even atmospherically like the original scene where Mrs. Brisby confronts the Great Owl. Despite a fairly impressive valley where the mice now live, you don't have any feel for their world like in the original, cobbled together by enhanced intelligence into makeshift versions of the human world, complete with electricity and moving parts. There are strange slang phrases present like, "You know what I'm sayin'?" and "team-player." It is linked to the original, though, and if your kids have not seen it, they will be confused.

I will give it credit for one amazing plot twist in the middle which took me by surprise, and they resisted the urge to cutesy it up like Lucas did with his Star Wars prequels. The voice acting was decent. Some of the jokes were funny. Really though, The Secret of NIMH, the original, had a vision and a lot of hard work put into it. The second felt more like a moderate effort for a calculated return on a direct-to-video sequel they knew most people would ignore outright. Compared to the average Disney movie, just as pure entertainment for kids who've never seen the original, I would rate it a 5 instead of the 3 I gave it. Worth renting, not buying.

This movie is a serious contender for the 'worst sequel ever' awards nomination category.

Let me elaborate on that...

I'll assume that when you read this review you are already familiar with Don Bluth's "The Secret of NIMH", which was a fine, dark and unusual animated movie that not at all conformed to the patented Disney cartoon mold which was lightweight, wholesome, pastel-colored nonsense with the characters spontaneously erupting in songs or other pace-annihilating planted plot permutations.

Instead, Bluth had the guts to try out his own formula, which was delightfully dark and mystic and devoid of pesky singing characters. The late Elizabeth Hartmann most excellently provided the voice for the humble and brave female protagonist rodent, Mrs. Brisby, and made the timid little mouse bigger than any animated character on the screen I had seen yet. NIMH was a good movie, even if Bluth made some liberal interpretations of the book on which it was based.

Jerry Goldsmith's rousing themes throughout the movie are a delightful bonus too. (the fact that the movie got trashed in the box office by E.T. was partly responsible for the advent of Bluth's most excellent animated laserdisc video arcade games coming into being.) Bluth never quite made another good dark movie after NIMH... The Disney Bug ate his brain, or something, because most of his subsequent films had pukey-cute designs and pesky critters singing (and even pesky marketable comic sidekicks.)

Now, NIMH 2 ...

1) Starts with a lame recap of the first movie; notably, Peter Strauss' voice for Justin has been dubbed over...

2) ... Is followed by the worst video-animated logo you can imagine. It's like a demented 3D Studio learner's first project. You can see the friggin PIXELS!!

3) Has god-awful backgrounds painted in naive primary colors

4) Has god-awful animation which was allegedly outsourced to a bunch of animation sweatshops in eastern europe. It shows.

5) Introduces a token female 'love interest' for the now-grown-up Timothy. She has BOOBS. She's a friggin MOUSE! How revolting... I thought this sort of crap was only made by sweaty fanboys.

6) Introduces a token comic sidekick, which is some kind of incredibly annoying, talking green bug with orange hair, a suit and bowler hat. How out of NIMH style is that, I ask you?

7) Has songs. And I don't mean incidental, or is that accidental stuff you can just crank the volume down at. (Many people didn't like that "Flying Dreams" song in the first movie either.) But noooo! The critters are all a-singing and a-dancing, and the songs are shrill and cacophonic and performed and orchestrated like high school theater plays. How unbearable! One of the songs even has a 'duet' performed with a video split-screen! Wheee!

8) Has the whole NIMH thing, which was a relatively sober and seemingly 'real' medical research lab, turn into Castle Frankenstein and brings one of the most perfectly stereotypical 'villains' into existence, complete with stiff mechanical (meniacal?) cackles and rolling demented eyes. This character looks like a left-over from a budget PC adventure game.

9) Is just stupid (pardon the regression)

10) Is a complete and utter waste of money, an insult to all thinking viewers, kids and grown-ups alike, an iron-studded MGM boot in the face to the artists who made the first movie possible, and the fans who liked it.

In closing, all I want to remark is that I hope MGM will release "The Secret of NIMH" in widescreen on DVD as they promised.

Never in my entire existence have I been so entirely disappointed in one single streak. Honestly. My heart falls when I think that an entire generation is likely to remember THIS travesty as the only NIHM movie.

This is little more than a piece of Direct-to-Video drivel, moulded right from the formula that Disney has, as of late, ironed out and pushed down our throats. Maybe I'm jaded, but I still cannot accept this as a NIHM movie.

I was a child when Bluth unveiled the original Secret Of NIHM, over a decade ago now; re-releases, video versions, and all the rest have never dulled the fantasy and wonder of it. This 'sequel', as it sees fit to call itself, has none of that life. The plot is weak, formulamatic; the voice acting is merely marginal; music is used where unnecessary, simply because it can be (The Great Disney Fallacy, in action again); the story of the original is scattered like so much debris...but that's not the worst.

The worst is that there is no wonder here. No grand adventure, no superheroes and magic and characters that make you want to dream with them. None whatsoever.

If this is the new trend of children's movies, my kids are going to watch an awful lot of ratty, worn-out, videos.

The original Secret of Nimh is an absolute masterpiece,(I do confess I saw this and the original fairly recently) with gorgeous animation, great characters and phenomenal music by the late Jerry Goldsmith, and is regarded by a vast majority including myself as Bluth's masterpiece. However, this sequel is awful in every aspect, and makes Rock a Doodle Doo, Troll in Central Park and almost all of the Disney sequels look like masterpieces, which of course they are definitely not. Sure it is a direct to video sequel, but the cheap production values really show here.

The animation was horrid. The character animations were jarring, and the editing was very choppy. The colours made the backgrounds look extremely flat and dull, and the visual effects rarely impressed either.

One of the highlights of the original was the music by the wonderful Jerry Goldsmith, who has also done magnificent scores for Legend and Rambo:First Blood. In the sequel, the music was dreadful,(lacking the darkness and lyricalism of the original's) and it was pretty evident that Goldsmith's score is sorely missed. "Just say yes" (I think it's called)is the only half decent song in the movie. And the singing was even worse, it was as if the vocalists thought they were singing in a school end of year production.

The dialogue was pathetic, and held no correlation whatsoever to the original or the parts of the book I read. Some of it was extremely cheesy, it really was. Also it completely lacked the mystery and suspense of the first film.(sorry I'm comparing the whole time, and this is what I honestly feel) The plot was also unoriginal and unevenly paced, and inappropriately bright, compared to the darkness and sentiment of the original.

It was also a shame that the characters that made the original so memorable didn't have a bigger part to play. Timmy came across as rather whiny and annoying, a far cry from Elizabeth Hartmann's sorrowful and poignant portrayal of Mrs Brisby who you hardly see in the sequel, and Dom DeLuise was nowhere near as funny as he was in the original. Justin's voice was dubbed, and quite poorly might I add. I also thought, and I am probably the only person to think this, that the villains were rather lame. Despite some spirited voice work from Eric Idle, the villain Martin was very bland, in everything he did and said. In the original, Jenner while not the best and most complex villain ever, was very convincing, a complete juxtaposition of the villain here.

In conclusion, an awful sequel to a beautiful film. The only redeeming quality was the talented voice cast, who were given little to work with. I am truly sorry I am sounding like a broken record, and comparing the sequel to the original, but as honesty is the best policy, I'll be perfectly frank, and say I didn't like this movie at all. 1/10 (originally a 2, but it was worse when I saw it again to make sure I wasn't taking leave of my senses) Bethany Cox.