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.
