MovieChat Forums > The Secret of NIMH (1982) Discussion > The first high quality movie since Sleep...

The first high quality movie since Sleeping Beauty?

posted 17 years ago by Askur
3 replies | jump to latest

I'm talking about the visual impression, at least in USA, even if there is nothing negative to say about the story of Nimh, which was one of my favore animated movies when I grew up.

In the 60's and 70's the animation had declined even at Disney. Lasseter himself said that in the early 80's, he felt 101 Dalmatians represented the peak of animation technology and storytelling at that point, and something new had to be done, or else Disney would be finished. The Xerox trademarks were still very visible, and the movies themselves were relatively cheap.

With Nimh, Don Bluth did hand inking where possible, more colored toner in the Xerox lines, better cleanups, airbrush cels when needed and technological tools like a multiplane camera, backlight animation and other old techniques that the other studios seemed to have given up. The result was a movie that had a feeling of the old quality from animation's golden age.

From what the biography on imdb says, a major reason for leaving Disney was that he worked on Sleeping Beauty, and seeing how far the studio had fallen since then, he felt he had to do something himself to save American animation.

Is there any animated movies that looks better than Nimh which were made between 1960 and 1982? If so, there can't be too many of them.

[–] Jal8919536 16 years ago

Speaking of Disney's "Sleeping Beauty", Don Bluth during his Disney Daze was among the animation crew. Plus, the styles and colors schemes in "NIMH" were the same as the ones in "SB" (Mrs. Brisby the same shade of red as Mistress Flora), plus Justin and Jenner having the same kind of brooches like the three good fairies.

[–] 16 years ago

[deleted]

[–] lvd_orders 16 years ago

Along that same line, Plague Dogs (1982) may have better animation than Secret of NIMH but I need to qualify that: It used more robust techniques that COULD have been used in NIMH but aren't (I assume for cost reasons.) But on the other hand, both watership down and plague dogs have lower frame count, less in-betweeners working on it I assume, so the films feel more stilted. Its also a distinctly different style than US animation, so comparisons may seem weird at first.

Where Plague dogs wins (at least for me) are some of the multi-plane camera shots--for instance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUDzklWlvho
Watch 2:15 to end. This sequence in particular, while maybe not coming off as glitzy as something American, is in fact far more technical than anything ANY US studio had done since Disney in its prime (IE Bambi.)

The issue is that after fantasia, Roy had gotten after Walt about how he threw his money away, trying to make animation into a real art form and what-not, and what you get is a gradual cheapening down of their films over time.

I basically agree with the original poster here, and that's too bad. NIMH has strong fluid motion, awesome art direction and amazing use of non-static colors (just what color is Mrs. Brisby's cape???) All of this adds up to NIMH being an incredible piece of animation, and how great might it have been if Bluth had had the higher goal Walt once had of actually pushing animation AS art instead of just establishing his separation from Disney.

The sad thing is, there's a lot of talk from Bluth at this time period and what he wanted to do. If you read any of it, you start getting very excited about where he wanted to go--and I even remember at the time a nice article in Time about NIMH and Bluth. Here's where I clearly disagree with others here in that I don't think what Bluth did subsequently was that great and would actually argue that NIMH is one of the best looking animated films from the US not just since the 60's or so, but also retains this status even today. Even at the height of Disney's new golden age (IE 90's) I don't think they did much to rival NIMH.