The Process of 'NIMH'

Don Bluth's masterpiece, plus news.

A still from The Secret of NIMH (1982)

Welcome! This is a new Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Our lineup:

• 1) What went into The Secret of NIMH.

• 2) Animation news in brief.

Before we get started — one of the best films we saw last year, Regular Rabbit, has finally been released on YouTube. It’s a hilarious dark comedy, and its visual style (flat, graphic shapes over 3D) looks great. Highly recommended.

With that, here we go!

1 – A second age

Banjo the Woodpile Cat was Don Bluth’s training ground. As a Disney animator studying to be a director, he wanted to learn more, faster. He and his friends and colleagues spent the second half of the ‘70s moonlighting on Banjo in his garage. Then, in 1979, Bluth led an exodus of Banjo staffers out of Disney.

We told that story last Sunday.

These events rocked the animation world. Several Disney films were delayed or derailed, and Bluth was now a competitor with ambitious plans. It was almost a flashback to the ‘40s — when the ex-Disney artists of UPA reshaped the medium.

Almost, but not quite. Like Sight and Sound put it in 1982, the Bluth defection was:

… the biggest upheaval in the Disney cartoon factory since the bitter animators’ strike of 1941, but this one was underscored by an interesting irony. The tirelessly driven Bluth and his friends were not avant-gardists bent on subverting the studio’s artistic traditions. On the contrary, they quit because the new Disney was for them not Disneyish enough. Bluth’s dream was to bring back the Snow White and Pinocchio era. He wanted the studio to produce animated features in the expensive and labor-intensive style in which every scene shimmered with detailed movement. He wanted to leave behind the light comedy of The Aristocats and The Jungle Book and return to stories that contained raw danger and tragedy.

For Bluth, the medium had peaked with Walt Disney’s big five: Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi. It wasn’t only their rich animation, but also their style and effects — the light and shadow, glow and sparkle, dust and smoke, camera movement, focal depth, colored linework. In these films, the whole screen is alive.

Moving drawings around isn’t enough, said Bluth. These extra steps, which Disney had slowly abandoned, help to erase the “artist’s presence” and keep “the brush strokes invisible to the audience.” When the artist is out of the way, Bluth argued, the viewer can sink into the story and accept the world and characters as real. People become immersed only when they “forget that what they are seeing is drawn.”

He and his team called this approach classical animation, and they wanted to bring it back. Taking what they’d learned on Banjo, they began a feature film meant to pick up from where Bambi had left off. A living story with “more insight, more hope [and] more fear” than Disney had managed in decades.¹

This was The Secret of NIMH.

Stills from The Secret of NIMH

If you’ve never watched NIMH, it’s a classic about animals in a field — with magic, sci-fi technology and a secret society of lab rats involved. The hero is a mouse, Mrs. Brisby, who’s a widowed mother of four. One of her children has pneumonia. She moves heaven and earth to keep him alive.

It’s an unlikely story. In fact, Mrs. Brisby might be the unlikeliest star ever in Hollywood animation. She wouldn’t be greenlit today, which is our loss. Her tale of overcoming in a dark, violent world is a moving one — for any viewer.

As Bluth said in production, “We don’t want people to think we’re making a children’s picture. We’re not. We are attempting to stimulate on all levels, for all ages.”

The plan for NIMH arrived late in Bluth’s Disney years. Aurora Productions, based in Hollywood, wanted to do an independent feature with him. Bluth and his friends Gary Goldman and John Pomeroy hastily pitched the book Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (1971) as their starting point. Disney had rejected it before, but Aurora was sold.

More than $6 million was soon lined up to make the movie, and the quitting began in September 1979. NIMH got going a few months later. Bluth’s garage team leased a building in Studio City, Los Angeles, and gradually shifted over.

It was a time of excitement — and uncertainty. As Bluth put it:

It was very scary when we left. We felt as if we had cast off from the Queen Mary in a very small dinghy. Some people said we were crazy, that it couldn’t be done. There were times when we thought they might have been right.²

Work on NIMH underway. Left to right: Don Bluth, John Pomeroy and Gary Goldman. Courtesy of The Don Bluth Collection of Animation.

Despite their fears, Banjo really had taught them how to run a production. They’d worked on that project since 1975, learning through painful mistakes. Bluth said that there was “a 3-foot-high stack of scenes that we had done and thrown out” by the end. Now, though, they had some idea of what they were doing.

“By the time we were financed to do The Secret of NIMH, we had certain things in place that we knew,” Goldman explained. “How to make a schedule, how much footage we had to do each week in each department. And so it wasn’t as hard as you might think to jump out, start a company and start a movie at the same time.”

Bluth’s own role in this process can’t be overstated. Producers ruled at Disney, but things were different on NIMH.

Like an auteur director in anime, Bluth storyboarded NIMH solo, at a high level of detail. He was the character designer and the main layout artist, and he helped to direct the colors and backgrounds. Bluth also “provided poses in every scene” and animated several minutes of the movie — the final battle sequence was his work.

The script was primarily his, too. “Don would try to write two pages of script a night,” said Goldman, “and bring it in for John Pomeroy, myself [and] Will Finn. And we would criticize or we would accept.”

It took time to mold the book into a screenplay. Part of it was making Mrs. Brisby a more active hero. Bluth noted that he changed her from “a damsel in distress who is waiting to be rescued” into someone with “great inner strengths” in the process of growing. He was inspired by his own grandmother, a widow who’d raised a large family. Bluth told the press:

She’s a mouse, but she’s a lady. Like a lot of women, she has problems, and she finds the strength inside her, not by getting help from institutions like the government or the church. We were trying to make a film with a moral. It’s not just cute.³

A sequence of Bluth’s storyboards for the film. Many of his boards were later colored (seemingly by other artists) and repurposed as color keys. Courtesy of The Don Bluth Collection of Animation.

Character design exploration for NIMH. Courtesy of The Don Bluth Collection of Animation.

To make NIMH with the old Disney approach, Bluth and company had to combine quality with cost control. Their budget was roughly half of what Disney spent on The Fox and the Hound (1981), which had fewer bells and whistles. Plus, Don Bluth Productions paid union wages like the established studios. As they noted:

From January 1980 to May of 1982 we produced The Secret of NIMH for $6.3 million. The union rate for an animator was $500 per week. We had 100 artists and technicians on staff and 45 [cel] painters working in their homes. We paid union salaries and benefits.

Stretching their money far enough to make an 80-minute film meant working quickly and efficiently. And yet they wanted to bring back techniques that’d been abandoned for the sake of efficiency. It required a balance.

For one, NIMH’s team was lean compared to today. Small strike forces handled most jobs. The roughly 1,078 background paintings came from three or four artists. Don Moore crafted the haunting chambers of Nicodemus and the Great Owl, where Mrs. Brisby has mystical experiences, while Ron Dias painted the scenes in the mill. Those are just examples — each painter handled vast sections alone. To create a sense of depth, without extra work for the camera, Bluth had them paint partly out of focus.

Meanwhile, there were just 11 key animators. Bluth assigned shots to the person best suited to the content of a scene — he called it “casting.” Lorna Cook, good at emotion and closeups, drew moments like the one when Mrs. Brisby learns how her husband died. Linda Miller specialized in comedy, animating a lot of Jeremy the Crow, NIMH’s comic relief.⁴

These small strike forces were always active. “[O]ur secret to keeping costs down on a full animation picture is to not waste resources,” Bluth said. Idle hands were quickly filled with other work, and any downtime was cause for alarm. Here’s Goldman:

Panic happened weekly, even daily, with solving bubbles or bottlenecks in the system, scenes held up in different departments, sometimes because of difficulty level, multiple characters, multiple effects levels, various issues that caused inventory delays.

NIMH key animators from left to right: Heidi Guedel, Linda Miller (sitting), Lorna Cook, Emily Jiuliano. Courtesy of Great Women Animators.

Background paintings from The Secret of NIMH. Courtesy of Thorn Valley.

As they streamlined in one respect, the Bluth team indulged in another. For the look of NIMH, no efforts were spared. There were at least 45 different color palettes for Mrs. Brisby alone, based on lighting and location. Even Disney’s retro multiplane camera setup, where artwork is layered on multiple sheets of glass, appeared in certain shots. Almost every scene is a feat of photography.

These were the years before digital compositing — old-world Hollywood magic powered the look of NIMH, and most of it involved multiple exposures of the film stock. In 1982, Goldman mentioned that a typical shot needed “three to five passes through the camera” to create the layers of effects. Some took as many as 11 or 12. Even a shadow cast by a character needed its own pass, for the transparency.⁵

Here’s Goldman on the process of creating transparent smoke effects for NIMH:

Since all of our effects are done “in-camera” on the original film, several passes are required. For example, we may shoot a scene at 60 percent of the correct exposure with the smoke cels over the character and background. Then the camera is backed up and the characters are shot at 40 percent of the correct exposure without the smoke effect cels. The result is that the characters and background are in there at 100 percent, but the smoke is at 60 percent so it looks more believable.

Or we might shoot the scene at 100 percent exposure, back the camera up, put a diffusion lens on the camera and shoot the smoke cels at 40 percent over a black background. Then the smoke takes on a very soft, wispy, diffused effect.

Lighting effects were treated just as carefully, and with beautifully rich results. Reading about the process today, though, is a wild experience. It’s so foreign to modern compositing that it can be hard to wrap your head around it.

NIMH’s lead effects animator, Dorse Lanpher, was one of Disney’s former experts. In his memoirs, he explained a tiny part of NIMH’s lighting effects — the fiery opening titles. He called the trick “primitive” by the standards of the computer age, but it comes across more as ingenious. Here’s his description:

For the main title of The Secret of NIMH, I wanted the flames to appear to be more magical than just flames, so I asked Joe [Jiuliano] if we could do a second exposure pass through the camera and truck in on each frame. I wanted the flames to radiate light beams out at the screen. Joe rigged up stops, using paper clips ... [that] would trip open the shutter when the camera started to truck down, at precisely the right time, and close it when the camera had completed the move. This would smear the back-lit flame matte on the film frame and make it appear as light radiating out from the flames.

All these years later, NIMH effects like this one haven’t been fully simulated by digital tools. The effects artists (maybe five total, plus assistants) were playing with the properties and flaws of physical film — even using it the “wrong” way to get results. There’s a certain depth and subtlety to their work that’s magical even now.

The opening titles, with the “smeared” light created by opening the shutter while moving the camera closer to the artwork

Not all of the creative tricks on NIMH were indulgences. Some were really cost-saving workarounds. There was just enough cheating to get by.

Besides his effects work, Lanpher’s first job on NIMH was to build the interior of Mrs. Brisby’s home — physically. It was “a large three-foot by three-foot scale model, with a staircase and fireplace,” he wrote. The team modeled many locations throughout NIMH in the same way. Why? For the layouts, the drawings that developed Bluth’s storyboards into blueprints for the final artwork.

“We’ve tried to get very unusual dramatic angles in all of our layouts,” Bluth said. Taking photos of scale models and starting the drawings from there sped things up.

Models got used for rotoscoping, too. In a famous scene, Mrs. Brisby escapes a bird cage. She was animated by hand, but the cage wasn’t. As Lanpher explained:

We’ve taken a regular bird cage model, painted it black and white so that we could photograph it against light blue. We shot it at 96 frames per second to get a sharp image. Then we print the film back at 24 fps and photostat the frames as black and white prints. … After the stats of the bird cage have been retouched and redefined, we make Xerox cels of those. And those are painted as standard animation. … Actually, there’s an even more elaborate scene which made use of this technique. The rats take Brisby through a canal into their cavern. We’ve used models of boats to similar effect.

Bluth relied on rotoscoping for his final battle sequence, too. He started by cutting up and editing together sword-fight scenes from three live-action movies. His assistant did simple traces of the footage, and these became Bluth’s reference for the animation. His results are close to the source video, but they still look great.

Top photo: Dorse Lanpher, John Pomeroy, Don Bluth and Gary Goldman with Lanpher’s scale model of Mrs. Brisby’s home. Bottom photo: filming the model of the boat for rotoscoping. Courtesy of The Don Bluth Collection of Animation.

It should go without saying that NIMH was difficult. Lanpher noted that they were in the studio “many weekends and many evenings.” But the project ran on enthusiasm — the team was on a mission. They felt that they were saving animation.

In fact, NIMH’s marketing billed it as the start of “the second age of animation.” The opening of a new era, akin to what Disney had achieved in the 1930s. Bluth called Banjo their own Steamboat Willie. While he didn’t claim that NIMH was the new Snow White, the studio did publish a timeline of animation history that included the release years of both Snow White and NIMH.

These were big claims. But NIMH was turning out well, and Bluth and his team finished it not just on time but ahead of schedule — after the release date was moved up to July 1982. Their hope, and belief, was that animation as good as the old days would bring audiences like it had in the old days.

But there were problems upstream: buyouts and Hollywood reorganizations. MGM ended up in control of NIMH and didn’t want it. As Bluth told the press:

We had to raise another $4,200,000 on our own from private funding to pay for the prints and the ad campaign for MGM to spend. MGM had no faith in our animated feature and they used a rollout campaign, starting on the Coast and working eastwards.

Under these conditions, the film struggled to find an audience in theaters. Not many got to see its beautiful images, and left-field story, on the big screen. It wasn’t an outright flop, but it didn’t do very well.

Top photo: Bluth discussing a “storyboard” for the bird cage sequence. Middle photo: Lanpher holding a layer used in the effects. Bottom photo: the photography department. Courtesy of The Don Bluth Collection of Animation and the Don Bluth Facebook page.

Films like Steven Spielberg’s E.T. were dominating the summer 1982 box office — NIMH was buried. It earned around $12 million in the States by the end of 1982, plus a reported $8 million in Germany. Later releases on home video were more successful, and it slowly became a cult classic. As Goldman has noted, Pinocchio and Fantasia didn’t make money at first, either.

That said, Don Bluth Productions wasn’t Disney, and it couldn’t afford a middling performer like NIMH. Things looked bleak in the months after its release: the “second age of animation” hadn’t arrived after all. They’d put so much heart into their film, into making it something that could last, and it hadn’t paid off. In 1984, Bluth said:

… we were probably at our lowest ebb. We had just finished doing Secret of NIMH, which was not a box office smash. We were wondering whether we were going to go out of business, and whether all this would end with a whimper.

As bad as it looked, though, it wasn’t the end. The thing was, NIMH was still a great film. It’d recaptured the old magic in a new form. Key people noticed.

One of them was Rick Dyer, a member of the game industry. “I saw Secret of NIMH,” he told Bluth. “How would you like to animate the first LaserDisc game?” This led Bluth and his team to animate Dragon’s Lair (1983), an early arcade game that basically printed money. It kept the studio alive. And, in the background, another opportunity was coming up.

Not long after NIMH came out, its composer Jerry Goldsmith (Gremlins) put it on the radar of Steven Spielberg. Bluth later reported Spielberg’s reaction: “I thought this kind of animation was dead. I’ve been told forever that you can’t do this anymore — it’s too expensive.” He had a meeting with Bluth’s group in September 1982, and committed to doing a movie with them based on the strength of NIMH.

There were challenges ahead for Don Bluth Productions: things were never easy there. But the effort they’d put into NIMH, this attempt to restore the heart and technique of the old days, had paid off in an unexpected way. A few years later, with the Spielberg-backed hit An American Tail (1986), Bluth would defeat Disney at the box office. Animated features, declared dead in the early ‘80s, were back.⁶

The whole thing had started with the bold, heartfelt and slightly naive quest to save animation with NIMH. They hadn’t done it — not right away. But they’d made a very, very good film, and a meaningful one. And that counted for a lot.

2 – Newsbits

• In China, The Boy and the Heron has broken the $100 million mark, according to Maoyan.

• Chilean filmmakers Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña (The Wolf House) will show their new feature film The Hyperboreans at Cannes next month.

• The American distributor GKIDS will be releasing a new, 4K edition of Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence in theaters. It’s one of Mamoru Oshii’s hardest-to-place films, and contains really beautiful moments.

• Also in America, director Jorge Gutierrez revealed that his film I, Chihuahua is “officially dead” at Netflix, but not canceled. He’s hoping to continue it with a different studio.

• In Japan, Anime Style is releasing The Millennium Actress Archives, a new collection of art from the film.

• The Amazing Digital Circus by Glitch Productions (Australia) has a trailer for its second episode, which went well over 8 million views in a couple of days. The episode itself is scheduled to hit YouTube on May 3.

• Check out the teaser for a new Japanese short: Kumabachi Bee by Junji Kobayashi, the sole animator of Osamu Tezuka’s Jumping (1984).

• The Chinese film Art College 1994 (by the director of the great Have a Nice Day) is screening in New York City. Animation Magazine reports that Metrograph will stream it as well.

• Also coming to New York theaters: Robot Dreams, the Spanish Oscar nominee.

• Lastly, we wrote about the creative run-ins of Satoshi Kon and Mamoru Oshii: two difficult people, two auteurs, who worked together but couldn’t get along.

See you again soon!

1. Sources for this first section of the article (and later): Sight and Sound (Spring 1982), Variety (May 19, 1982), Films on Screen and Video (December 1982), Maclean’s (October 29, 1979), Film Comment (July/August 1982).

2. Sources for this second part of the article include Cinefantastique (February 1982), the Secret of NIMH press kit, Bluth’s autobiography Somewhere Out There and Dorse Lanpher’s book Flyin’ Chunks and Other Things to Duck. There’s also the archived Don Bluth contact page and this old site (which quoted parts of the Don Bluth contact page that weren’t archived).

3. Sources for this third part include the Chicago Tribune (July 11, 1982), The Philadelphia Inquirer (August 2, 1982), Don Bluth’s The Art of Storyboard, Exposure Sheet (issue 3), the Secrets Behind the Secret documentary and two more archives of the Don Bluth contact page.

4. Sources for the fourth section include American Cinematographer (August 1982), Exposure Sheet (issue 5), the director’s commentary track on the Blu-ray release of NIMH and the Bluth contact page, alongside sources cited previously.

5. Sources for the fifth section include Comics Scene (May 1982), the Simi Star Valley (July 2, 1982) and the foregoing sources.

6. Sources for the last leg of the article: Fantastic Films (June 1982), the Bluth contact page, the Marysville Journal-Tribune (October 3, 1983), this interview with Bluth, Computer Games (April 1984), the NIMH press kit and Exposure Sheet (issue 4).