The Secret of NIMH is Getting Rebooted...

*Sigh*...Oh Hollywood, thou art a bitch...hm, i feel like i've used that opening line before, well it's Hollywood so, I wouldn't be surprised. If you haven't heard, The Secret of NIMH is getting rebooted, already sounds like a bad idea but you just wait. It's going to be a live action/CGI mix (Ugh) it's going to be part of a planned franchise (Ugh!) and it's being written by the writer of Ice Age 5 (UGH!). I know I shouldn't make a judgement on this movie before seeing it but...seriously, they made every wrong turn and the movie hasn't even begun production yet.

If you aren't aware of The Secret of NIMH, it's an animated film from Don Bluth, and like everything Don Bluth made back in the 1980's it was a masterpiece. It's a timeless story with a unique protagonist, thought provoking ideas and of course, masterful animation. Everything about the movie works, the only criticism i can even conjure up is that the pacing is slow, but really, that's a nitpick. The movie doesn't need to be rebooted because it's already as perfect as it can be. And besides, if the reboot turns out to be a hit, what's to stop them from rebooting Land Before Time and American Tail!? Can't you just reboot the crap movies Don Bluth made? Leave the masterpieces alone!

But let's talk about some of the ideas they've put forth, the concept of it being live action/CGI, oh yeah, because that always worked so well with The Smurfs and Alvin & The Chipmunks; and even then, best case scenario is that you have convincing CGI that looks like a mouse. The original still has breathtaking animation that tops anything they can do with CG. It's going to be a new franchise: Did you not see Secret of NIMH 2? It sucked, how many secrets of NIMH are there? It's the writer of Ice Age 5: Now i couldn't find out who the writer of Ice Age 5 is (A franchise that needs to die by the way) but i'm just guessing that there's nothing too impressive on his resume that lives up to mature storytelling of the original.

Now i know that i should go into this movie with an open mind and it is entirely possible that it will surprise me and be really good. But nothing so far exists to give me any faith in that happening, so let's talk about some of the arguments for the remake. It's going to be more faithful to the original book: Trust me, if anything in it is more faithful to the book, that is purely coincidence and that doesn't instantly make it a good movie anyway. It could do with a modern retelling: Why? The original is a timeless classic, it's not dated, the ideas and characters are still relevant to today, the only way how "modernizing" it is going to change anything is by putting in pop culture references and a lot of slang, yeah, because that's not gonna be dated 5 years down the line.

So no, i know i sound incredibly negative here but i am, this is a reboot that doesn't need to happen, it is a terrible idea and it honestly sounds like this is just going to lead from bad to worse.

-Danny