I liked the original NIMH film, I did. Dark and somber. I'd say it's Don Bluth's best film. The sad thing, sequels to Bluth films tend to be better than the original film (An American Tail, All Dogs Go to Heaven) but I betcha he's happy for once that did not happen. Not with NIMH 2.

We start off with a recap of what happened in NIMH 1. Seeing that they re-used the old footage instead of re-animating them I was hoping to see the same sort of dark visual style. I was wrong. NIMH 2 looks like an episode of the Smurfs without the Smurfs on crack. It's the antithesis of the previous film. Bright, cheery, uninspired backgrounds and basic character design devoid of any detail. Yeah, good stuff.

Either way, without going into too much detail, after seeing your favorite characters from the original film make horrid re-appearances the protagonist Timmy and his stacked girlfriend along with yourself are thrust into a land where the headquarters of NIMH is Castle Frankenstein and Timmy's brother becomes a British insane genius voiced by Eric Idle possibly singing the most cheery "I'm gonna take over the world" song ever. You know, I seriously think the original VHS tapes came with complimentary marijuana to enhance the viewing pleasure and ease the pain. That's what sucks about DVDs, you don't get stuff like that no more.

I was laughing my ass off for the entirety of the film because nothing made sense. Suspension of disbelief is all well and good, but mine won't stretch this far. Watch it back-to-back with the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour and your drug addiction will have been cured. I feel pretty sure that you will not think this film is a complete waste of time if you see it after not having slept for 72 hours, like me. It's not that bad of a film really.

The Secret of NIMH was one of the best kid's movies ever. It disturbed and frightened me as a kid in the way a good fairy tale does (or the way adult movies disturb and frighten adults in on a different scale), because it makes you think about big issues, but in a way that kids can still learn from and love to watch. The sequel, wow, it was pretty bad. The animation quality was okay, not as good as the original but not horrible, but the story went the way of a mediocre afternoon TV cartoon. They added a few cartoony characters for comic effect, including a caterpillar and two cats, who could talk although it was never explained how since they had never been experimented on by NIMH. They turned it into a Disneyesque musical, with a song every 10 or 20 minutes. One character switches from an American to a British accent in the middle of the film for no reason. It's not scary in the least, not like the original, even atmospherically like the original scene where Mrs. Brisby confronts the Great Owl. Despite a fairly impressive valley where the mice now live, you don't have any feel for their world like in the original, cobbled together by enhanced intelligence into makeshift versions of the human world, complete with electricity and moving parts. There are strange slang phrases present like, "You know what I'm sayin'?" and "team-player." It is linked to the original, though, and if your kids have not seen it, they will be confused.

I will give it credit for one amazing plot twist in the middle which took me by surprise, and they resisted the urge to cutesy it up like Lucas did with his Star Wars prequels. The voice acting was decent. Some of the jokes were funny. Really though, The Secret of NIMH, the original, had a vision and a lot of hard work put into it. The second felt more like a moderate effort for a calculated return on a direct-to-video sequel they knew most people would ignore outright. Compared to the average Disney movie, just as pure entertainment for kids who've never seen the original, I would rate it a 5 instead of the 3 I gave it. Worth renting, not buying.

It can be hard to do a sequel. Sequels are supposed to be continuations to popular movies to please fans of the movie. Some sequels can be just as good or even better than the original (like "Shrek 2" and "101 Dalmatians 2"), or be good but feel unnecessary (like "Pokemon 2000" or "Airplane 2"), but mostly, it could be bad altogether (I'm sure nobody liked "The Land Before Time 2" or "Scary Movie 2").

With that said, I'm sure that making a sequel to what is undeniably one of the best animated movies ever would be hard to do. I was aware that success would be a problem here, and I was right.

First of all, Don Bluth had no involvement with this movie, and this movie was made without his permission. Many fans, such as myself, were dismayed by the musical numbers that were put into this movie (Nobody likes songs in movies anyway.). Also, I don't like the movie's subtitle. Timmy was supposed to be the character who was sick and had to stay in bed. But now, all of a sudden, he's the hero?

Of course, since this movie came out in 1998 while the original came out in 1982, there was no excuse. It would have been hard to get the original cast back together, especially since five of the original actors died shortly after the original was released (two of which voiced characters who died in the original). Arthur Malet is back as Mr. Ages, and Dom DeLuise is back as Jeremy, and hey, they got Eric Idle into this movie too.

I don't have anything more to say about this awful movie. Stay away from this movie. You'd rather watch the original movie twice or three times a day then watch this movie.