The Secret of NIMH (1982) review

Animator Bluth's feature-length directorial debut involves widowed mouse Mrs. Brisby (voiced by Elizabeth Hartman) needing to find medicine for her sickly child Timothy (Ian Fried), encountering a variety of creatures - including clumsy crow Jeremy (Dom DeLuise), cranky Mr. Ages (Arthur Malet), wizard-like Nicodemus (Derek Jacobi) and the elusive Great Owl (John Carradine) - and then she learns about the fate of her late husband and his involvement with super-intelligent rats.  Although the animation is fine (for the early 1980's), the story itself seems a little fragmented and it might have benefited from being turned into a multi-part television series instead of an eighty-minute feature, since there are so many characters it never has much time to develop most of them sufficiently.  The title itself (supposedly) stands for the National Institute of Mental Health, and while I realize it's exclusively a movie for kiddos, a few more details regarding what kind of experiments the government was conducting on captured critters would have been beneficial ... and yet I appreciate the anti-cruelty stance.