Jessalynn Spoils It All: June 2015

The Secret of NIMH was one of those Staple Movies of my childhood, one of the movies we had a bootleg copy of on VHS that my dad had taped from the cable channels that we weren’t exactly paying for. I can still picture the tape. It had Follow That Bird and Pee Wee’s Big Adventure on it, too. We watched that movie to death. It’s actually very violent for a kid’s movie by today’s standards. It was probably a mile marker on my journey to loving horror movies. I always knew it was based on a book, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, but I had never read said book. Well, I just finished it today and it’s so boring and conflict free, it may as well be a lab created sapphire. And that’s generous; lab created sapphires are still pretty. I wrote a comparison so you never have to read that book and lose a little chunk of your childhood. If you've been meaning to see it, you should know I'm about to completely spoil a movie from 1982. Otherwise, you’re welcome.

BOOK: Timmy Frisby gets sick.

MOVIE: Timmy Brisby gets sick.

Mouse Pneumonia is bad news.

BOOK: “Mrs. Shrew” has one scene and she’s awful and everyone hates her.

MOVIE: Auntie Shrew has a few scenes and she’s awesome. She’s overbearing, but Mrs. Brisby’s (they even changed her name to something less stupid) kids love her.

So wise.

BOOK: Mr. Ages (their doctor, kinda) tells Mrs. Frisby that under no circumstances can Timmy be moved. He. Will. DIE. This is not good news because it's spring, and the plow is coming. The Brisby's have to move from the garden in like, two days.

MOVIE: Pretty much the same, actually, but I needed to mention Mr. Ages for those of you who haven't seen it, so you can keep up.

Grumble grumble don't you move Timmy because: DEATH.

BOOK: Mrs. Frisby meets Jeremy on her way back from Mr. Ages. He is just stuck on a piece of string because he is stupid, not because he’s looking for love.

MOVIE: Mrs. Brisby meets Jeremy (who is more like a middle aged Jewish New Yorker than a rural crow, but somehow it works much better) who is trying to find love by adding some colorful string to his nest.

The whole world! Will hear us singiiiiiiiing!

BOOK: The plow never even starts until it’s not a danger anymore. Seriously, the farmer goes outside to the plow and is like, "Gonna start this plow in a few days." End of chapter.

MOVIE: The plow starts up and CrazyPants Brisby jumps on and tries to stop it, so Auntie Shrew comes to her rescue and ACTUALLY STOPS IT because she is a damn HERO.

Plow Shmow, y'all. SHREW OUT.

BOOK: Jeremy takes Mrs. Brisby to the owl for help. The owl is not scary, nor is anyone scared of him, and then we never see Jeremy again.

MOVIE: Jeremy takes her to the owl, and they are both ***king terrified because they are MUCH lower on the ol’ food chain DUH. And that owl is scary as all hell. He tells her to ask the rats to help her move her house. Remember when he squishes that spider and then eats an adorable little moth? THE TERROR. Plus, we get plenty more Jeremy in future scenes.

See you later in my nightmares, Owl.

BOOK: Dragon, the farm cat, is also not terribly scary.

MOVIE: That is the creepiest freaking cat I’ve ever seen. My grandmother is oddly scared of domestic cats, and if they looked like that, I probably wouldn't think she was nuts. Like, WHERE DID YOU FIND THIS CAT.

Another nightmare joke goes in here.

BOOK: Mrs. Frisby goes to the rats, and Brutus (one of the rat's guards) has lines, and sounds a lot more like Martin (Mrs. Brisby's punk of an oldest son) than Martin does.

MOVIE: Brutus doesn’t talk, and he tries to SPEAR MRS. BRISBY TO DEATH FOR TRESPASSING, and then later, Mr. Ages, is all, “Oh, that’s just Brutus, he’s cool and it’s fine that he TRIED TO IMPALE YOU WITH HIS RAT SIZED SPEAR.”

Yep. Spear.

BOOK: Mrs. Frisby meets Justin (the good guy guard), notes that he's handsome, then moves on.

MOVIE: Mrs. Brisby meets Justin and is a little bit wooed by his cuteness and charm.

Resist me. I dare you.

BOOK: Jenner, the main villain in the movie, NEVER EVEN SHOWS UP in the present tense and is probably dead by the end of the book, although we never actually find out. Meaning there is really no direct villain in the book.

MOVIE: Jenner is all over this movie. The short story is he wants to lead the rats and is against The Plan (more on that below). He’s super evil because the screenwriters knew that no conflict equals no story.

Is a caption really necessary?

BOOK: Nicodemus (The Rat Leader) and Mr. Ages go ON AND ON AND ON about life after NIMH, like we care about the intimate details of The Plan. Like, oh, my God, what kind of soil are you going to use for the crops you're going to grow in The Plan? Also, there is no necklace, and it doesn’t matter. You’ll see.

MOVIE: Mr. Ages mostly bolts while Nicodemus tells the story of how they were trapped and drugged and made really smart by a group of scientists called NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health), so smart that they escape their scientists/kidnappers even though most of the mice die trying.

OW.

He tells her how her husband Jonathan saved all of their lives and was greatly respected by the rats (The Brisby’s are mice). Oh, and he died this past summer doing something brave again for the rats. She's still pretty bummed about it, which is why she's only a little wooed by Justin.

He looks like he'd know the words to the Mission Impossible theme if there were words.

Then Nicodemus is all, “Oh and we have a Plan to stop stealing, but I won’t bore you with details. Hey, here’s a cool necklace Jonathan would have wanted you to have. It does magic if you’re a really good person and passionate about something, in this case, I imagine it will be your children. Foreshadowing!”

Anyway, she asks him to help move her house and offers to help them with their Plan in return and he's like, "Anything for Mrs. Jonathan Brisby." *finger guns*

In retrospect, I guess this is kind of a clunky way to incorporate magic into a story that doesn't really have anything to do with magic, but it makes the climax of the movie awesome, so shut up and relax.

BOOK: Mrs. Frisby gets trapped by a kid in the farmhouse and put in a cage while she's trying to drug Dragon (long story having to do with The Plan and also how Jonathan got himself killed, FYI), but Justin saves her. Then she’s like, “Maybe I should tell the rats what the farmer said on the phone with NIMH about bulldozing their home? I dunno…”

MOVIE: Mrs. Brisby gets trapped and put in a cage and she gets herself out because: BADASS. Then she runs straight to the rats to warn them that NIMH IS COMING, YOU GUYS. HIDE YA KIDS.

BY THE POWERS OF NIMHSKULL

BOOK: The rats never even have to move her stupid house (fine, they move it like a foot away, and it's so brief and uneventful that I actually missed it the first time I read it). Timmy just gets better and they walk to their summer house.

MOVIE: The rats start moving her home while she looks on because Timmy is super sick and can’t move, and then ALL. HELL. BREAKS. LOOSE. Jenner goes off the rails, kills Nicodemus, goes for Mrs. Brisby.

STOP. KILLING EVERYBODY. Love, Justin

and his toady has to kill him to make him stop.

I couldn't find an image of Jenner's actual death, but it's pretty gruesome for a children's cartoon.

But by this time, the ropes and pulleys on the house are all cut (Jenner cuts them because: evil) and the house has sunk into the mud. The necklace starts glowing because it’s powered by Mrs. Brisby’s CRAZY/STUPID/LOVE for her children and it makes her strong enough to lift the house and move it all on her own. HERO.

I cry every time, and so do you.

BOOK: NIMH comes for the rats, but they are mostly gone. They left like 10 of the younger rats in the rosebush so it wouldn’t look abandoned. NIMH fills their home with poison gas and only 8 rats make it out. They don't say which rats died. More on that below. (I’d say the author is making a metaphor about how the rats are so human now that the old ones send their young ones off to die for their own interests much like humans in war, but I don’t think the author implied that metaphor as much as I inferred it.)

MOVIE: The rats are SO already gone. All of them. Like, there are dust trails.

BOOK: The End. Oh, wait no. JUSTIN IS PROBABLY DEAD AND NO ONE REALLY CARES.