I haven't seen many Don Bluth movies, despite my better sense telling me I need to, but today, I finally sat down and watched The Secret of NIMH.
I should preface this by saying that I started by reading the book, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, on the bus to and from work the last week. It's a charming book, and the heroine is amazing.
So I saw the movie today.
I already knew about the gem, which was not in the book, but I'd had no opinion on it. I've heard that it's meant to symbolize the unknown and the supernatural, which I had no problem with (I mean, I'm me), but I didn't know what it actually did in the movie.
Well, I watched the movie, and while I don't normally say things like this... the book was better than the movie.
First off, Jeremy. The crow shows up twice in the book, and he's foolish and constantly after shiny things, but he isn't annoying. In the movie, he's in every other scene, and he is incredibly annoying. He spends half of his lines fussing about not having a girlfriend, which is just irritating. In my roommate's words, he's a bit like Jar Jar Binks.
Now, I could deal with that, if they didn't cut out all the story about the rats to make time for Jeremy. The story of how the rats escaped and set up their home under the rosebush--just a few minutes. There's no explanation of how they have the tools, how they learned how to read, how they first came to NIMH, or any of that. Just, they got injections, they got smart, and they escaped.
The big thing they left out from the story was Jenner and Nicodemus' friendship. In the book, they were best friends even before NIMH, and they made such an effort to stay together during and after NIMH. This made Jenner's betrayal so much more painful and poignant in the book. In the movie, he is always a bad guy, immediately.
So instead of getting a complex, challenging story about a best friend's betrayal, we get entirely too much time dedicated to Jeremy whining about not having a girlfriend. Fabulous. To be clear, Jeremy gets more time than Jenner does in the movie.
Then, there's the gem. Like I said, I knew about it going in and had no real opinion on it. Now that I've seen it... it kind of bothers me. It just felt so out of place with Mrs. Frisby's character. I thought the point of Mrs. Frisby was that there was nothing special about her except for her love for her family and her courage--that was what enabled her to be a hero, and not some kind of magical gift. The gem sort of took that away; she almost became another "Chosen One" heroine. They tried to say that it was really the courage in her heart that made the gem work, but the magical powers of the gem sort of defeated the purpose. At least for me. If they wanted to represent the power of the unknown and the supernatural, then they could have played it differently.
The whole movie wasn't terrible--especially not the parts without Jeremy--and the animation was spectacular. I just think that the deviations from the novel weakened the main heroine.
