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N.I.M.H.
"Bloomin' Disney!"
In these times of lairy Pixar and DreamWorks hegemony, and with Disney having rather fallen by the wayside of late, it's increasingly easy to forget that not all cartoon features are or were smoothly crafted by the smoke and mirrors that have recently turned out yer Nemos and yer Toy Stories. Okay, so there's also been Belleville Rendezvous and Spirited Away to keep the high-minded happy recently but, let's be honest, if they had come on as a Saturday morning replacement for TISWAS in the summer we wouldn 't have been happy. And it's worth bearing in mind that even when Uncle Walt had his eye on the ball and was turning out top flight stuff like The Jungle Book, Sleeping Beauty and, latterly, Aladdin there were other kids on the block knocking out stuff that matched up to the best of them. They might not have had the same money as The Mouse and consequently they may have not kept inside the lines when colouring in quite so much but that was to be expected really.
So this week Creamguide (Films) calls to mind some of those animated features that made an impression, good or bad, and which were actually drawn by people with actual pencils and things. We start with our titular favourite, THE SECRET OF N.I.M.H. Apart from anything else this benefits from having the least likely storyline of any cartoon we've ever seen - and considering the subject under discussion that's saying something. N.I.M.H. lest we forget is an acronym for the National Institute of Mental Health, a charming animal testing-type facility that worked it's magic on a collection of rats and mice who subsequently became super intelligent and set up house in a rose bush. When one of the mice dies leaving his wife, Mrs Frisbee, a widower with a sick child she sets off to get help and is advised to see the rats of N.I.M.H. which she does with mixed results. Ring any bells?
Unsurprisingly it doesn't get many airings and the last we can recall was a Grampian-only showing around Christmas 1994 which is a shame as it's a splendid piece from no less a hand than doyen of independent animators, Don Bluth. Beautifully drawn and featuring the vocal talents of the calibre of Dom DeLuise, Derek Jacobi, Peter Strauss, Hermione Badderley and John Carradine (and as the brat children are the brat children Wil Wheaton and Shannon Doherty). Bluth had been an animator at Disney and presumably got fed up working on shit like Pete's Dragon and decided to get back to the full length animated feature which The Mouse had left behind at that point. Having spent some time after N.I.M.H. producing the animation for video games Space Ace and Dragon's Lair (don't open that hatch!) he settled down to produce some of the best cartoon films of their day including AN AMERICAN TAIL which is probably his best after N.I.M.H. and gave DeLuise another voice credit (which we're always in favour of) as well as Christopher 'cry havoc' Plummer and Madeline 'bwass tacks' Kahn.
Other entries in the Bluth canon include ALL DOGS GO TO HEAVEN and THE LAND BEFORE TIME although we must admit that by the time he started turning out the likes of ANASTASIA and THE PEBBLE AND THE PENGUIN we'd turned over. Perversely the best of those non-N.I.M.H. features actually had nothing to do with him but was a sequel to American Tale, namely FIEVEL GOES WEST which is just brilliant. With John Cleese voicing the baddie, yet another turn for Dom DeLuise (hurray!), Jon Lovitz as the psychotic knife-wielding spider Chula ("the incey wincey spider bit off the mouse's head!") and the masterstroke of casting James Stewart as the broken down old Sheriff Wylie Burp thereby providing one of the best and most genuinely moving finales to any film ever and to the career of Stewart himself. Anyway, as we say this wasn't actually a Don Bluth Production as by this time that Spielberg fella had shoehorned the rights away from him. Hey-ho.
Ignored at the time but suitably modish now is the Ralph Bakshi version of LORD OF THE RINGS which seemed terribly good at the time (those half-animated/half-live action Orcs being genuinely frightening) and which quite clearly having influenced the recent trilogy far more than Peter Jackson will admit. On the whole though, it's pretty rubbish. The plot makes little sense, the battle scenes are rather incongruously violent compared with the rest of the action and of course it stops just when things are hotting up. A bold effort but a failure nonetheless.
Closer to home and we get some real innovation with the genre-defining ANIMAL FARM from British Disney-baiters Halas & Bachelor. Famously all the parts are voiced by the late, great Maurice 'Rawley' Denham and the film has a curiously distinctive and very British feel about it, not cutesy-poo and a little strange and dark (like those odd Post Office animation shorts) and all the better for it. Next up on the home front is of course the ubiquitous Raymond Briggs and his eternally screened THE SNOWMAN - the only interesting fact about which we are aware (and there's probably only the one) being that the eponymous hit song wasn't sung on the film by Aled Jones - who only sang the chart version or, to use the common parlance, the Radio Edit - but by some other choir jonnie whose name we can't now recall.
Briggs of course turned out several more over the years, all much in the same homely and whimsical vein, including GRANPA voiced by Peter Ustinov, FATHER CHRISTMAS with the vocal talents of Mel Smith and not-quite-as-grim-as-Threads-but-still-overly-harrowing-for-twelve-year-olds -when-shown-it-at-school WHEN THE WIND BLOWS which gleefully and memorably depicted John Mills and Peggy Ashcroft eating tins of fruit while their hair fell out with David Bowie singing in the background. Briggs hasn't turned out any of his wholesome and literally titled epics of late but of course while THE SNOWMAN is shown every Christmas by Act of Parliament he doesn't really need to. Probably the next most famous British cartoon (apart from WATERSHP DOWN which, since it concerns rabbits ripping each others ears off, always leads us to believe anyone who enjoys it is a bit strange anyway) is THE YELLOW SUBMARINE which, even featuring Dick Emery and Lance Percival really (whisper it) isn't very good.
Of course, there was always a healthy diet of miscellaneous cartoonery in the Children's section of your local Carvill & Arcari early doors of the video age; some of which, such as THE SMURFS AND THE MAGIC FLUTE and THE FLIGHT OF DRAGONS should have been there and others, such as SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO and PLAGUE DOGS, clearly shouldn't. PLAGUE DOGS, for those of you who never had the benefit of a C&A shop round the corner, concerned a couple of dogs escaping from a N.I.M.H. type lab and being chased as they may (or may not) have anthrax. Yes, it's a laugh start to finish but benefits from a great cast of voices including John Hurt, Bill Maynard, James Bolam and Nigel Hawthorn. The aforementioned SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO was an early Manga-type effort from 1979 that concerned a sort of submarine that could turn into a sort of spaceship and was, we recall, rather good and had been aired previously (though not that we saw it) as a serial called STAR BLAZERS. That's nowt to do with anything but we thought we'd mention.
Also-rans include the woeful OLIVER AND COMPANY (it's Oliver Twist; and they're cats and dogs! Genius!) and, we suppose, those strange silhouette fairy-tale things that used to run on Saturday mornings and were a bit disturbing, especially when you had got up early expecting The Saturday Show. Lastly there is THE MOUSE AND HIS CHILD, brilliantly voiced again by Peter Ustinov and included for all posterity in the TV Cream Top 100 Films, the only animation to be there and well deserved, too.
So next time you have some restless nippers on your hands who demand to watch the DVD of The Lion King, slip on something else instead: why not delight them with THE SECRET OF N.I.M.H., surprise them with FIEVEL GOES WEST, enchant them with THE MOUSE AND HIS CHILD or, conversely, show them PLAGUE DOGS and just scare them shitless.
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