The Secret of NIMH 2: Timmy to the Rescue (1998) Review

"He's turned the humans into dogs!"

-Jenny McBride

After the events of the first film, Mrs. Brisby (Debi Mae West) sends her youngest son, Timmy (Ralph Macchio), to Thorn Valley, a colony of rats that previously escaped from NIHM (The National Institute of Mental Health), to train and learn how to be a hero.  Several years later, a young female mouse, Jenny McBride (Hynden Walch), arrives at Thorn Valley to tell them there are still animals being held prisoner at NIMH and they are being experimented on.  When the rats of Thorn Valley refuse to help, Timmy teams up with Jenny when he finds out his brother Martin, (Eric Idle), is being held prisoner at NIMH.  The two of them and some friends infiltrate NIMH, but soon discover exactly what has happened to Martin...and it's worse than anyone could have imagined.

What Works:

This section will be brief.  The best part of this movie if Eric Idle.  He commits to his insane performance 100%.  It's not a great role or character by any means, but Idle sells the utter madness that has taken over Martin.  His musical number is bats**t insane and is one of the only positive parts of the film.

I also do really like to look of NIMH itself.  It's so over-the-top in its evil and sinister aesthetic.  I saw this movie when I was a kid and I found NIMH very creepy and scary and it's one of the only things that stuck with me about this film.  I was pleased to find the location still looked very creepy.

Finally, one of my complaints about the original film was Dom DeLuise's character, Jeremy, being way to over-the-top.  He's still a werido in this movie, but they dial him back a bit and he doesn't get nearly as much screen time, which I appreciate.

What Sucks:

The Secret of NIMH had incredible animation, but Don Bluth had nothing to do with this movie and it shows.  The animation is very choppy and cheap.  It looks very bad at many points throughout the film.  I know most kids watching this wouldn't notice or care, but oof, it was rough to watch at time.

There are also many points where the audio doesn't sync with the movements of the characters' mouths. This happens from time to time in animated movie, but it's way too frequent in this movie for me to give it a pass.  Sometimes the characters aren't even moving their mouths at all and yet we are still hearing their dialogue.  Very sloppy.

The original movie has an extremely dark tone, which is what makes the movie so memorable.  The designs of the Great Owl and Nicodemus were utterly terrifying and scared me to death when I was a kid.  Apart from flashbacks, neither of those characters appear in this movie (to be fair, Nicodemus was killed in the first film), but the lack of the Great Owl is noticeable, especially because they mention him so often, but we never see him.  It's a shame because his design is amazing.  This all goes hand-in-hand with the overly lighthearted tone of this movie.  I wanted this to be dark, edgy, and traumatizing, like the original.  It was heavily Nerfed.

The choice to make this into a kid-friendly musical reminds me a lot of The Land Before Time sequels.  But some of those sequels were actually good and had some solid songs, that isn't the case here.  A lot of the lyrics don't work and the whole thing comes off as very lazy.

It takes Timmy and Jenny less than 10 minutes to actually get to NIMH.  A movie like this should have some obstacles in the path of our heroes to get to their destination.  This movie is set up as an adventure/journey movie, but the journey has one stop to pick up a couple of sidekicks and to sing a pointless musical number, then, all of a sudden, we're at NIMH.  It feels like we skipped over a few stops in the journey, especially because the runtime of this movie is only 79 minutes including the credits.

Verdict:

The Secret of NIMH 2: Timmy to the Rescue has one cool location, less Dom DeLuise, and Eric Idle giving it his all, but not much else going for it.  The plot is very stunted, the songs are lazy, the tone is too light, the animation is cheap, and the audio is lacking.  All in all, a very disappointing sequel to a film that did wonders to traumatize the youth of America.

 3/10: Really Bad