There is a human antagonist bent on capturing the Borrowers, which is the closest the story strays towards convention, but even this works in the film’s favor, for it adds a necessary weight to the emotional finale. Their love is far less obvious and far more meaningful. She befriends a human, yes, and while this turns into love, it is not romance. She has a pleasant, loving relationship with her parents, Pod and Homily, and there is no obnoxious family drama to speak of. Arrietty is a marvelous, strong-willed protagonist, and no more needs to be made of it than that. Yonebayashi’s “Arrietty” does none of this. I can imagine a horrifying American version of “Arrietty” where the title character’s parents try to quash her free-spirited nature, the humans are portrayed as evil, and Arrietty is berated by her kind for falling in love with one of them. Computers create extraordinarily photorealistic visuals, but here the human touch deepens the story’s themes of loneliness, friendship, the need for home and for being, literally, held.When it comes to Ghibli, I am always amazed, first and foremost, by their storytelling, for Miyazaki and company avoid the conventions and pitfalls that so often destroy lesser films. What the studio does, brilliantly, is preserve a hand-drawn look and feel in its work, as in the exteriors in “The Secret World,” where the characters pop against a painterly meadow. Ghibli still uses hand drawings, along with computer-generated imagery, though it shuns 3-D animation, the near-ubiquitous process in which models of characters are scanned three-dimensionally or created directly in a computer. The world outside, unsurprisingly for Ghibli, is lush and inviting, by turns a dense jungle and an impressionistic landscape washed in gradations of green and flecked with red, yellow and purple.
Yonebayashi fills in this hidden realm with fanciful dollhouse detail, both in the Clock quarters - where a clay flower pot serves as the hearth, and postage stamps hang like paintings - and in the shadowy interiors where Arrietty, nimbly scaling steps made of nails, first learns the art of the steal from her father, Pod (Will Arnett). The Clocks live under the floors of the human cottage, yet the home they’ve cobbled together from borrowed bits and purloined pieces is as cozy as the one upstairs.Ī Ghibli animator turned director, Mr. Part of the charm of the Borrowers books, a quality shared by the movie, is the theme of the tiny making wonderfully do in a world inhabited by, and made for, the big (like parents). An ungenerous soul might brand the Borrowers thieves the French filmmaker Agnès Varda would describe them as gleaners, those who live lightly on the land, taking what others don’t need, won’t miss and discard. “The Secret World of Arrietty,” as fans of “The Borrowers” will have sussed out, is based on the first of five books Mary Norton wrote about tiny people who primarily live off what they appropriate from human beings (or “beans,” as they call them). The cat belongs to the storybook cottage where her family lives and where a sick human boy, Shawn (David Henrie), has just moved in. That kind of screen equality is rare in American animation (this year Pixar releases its first movie with a female lead), but it’s never been an issue at Ghibli, where girls have long reigned, without the usual frou-frou, in films like “Spirited Away” and “Ponyo.” In keeping with that tradition, a tiara and pink tulle don’t make Arrietty special: her size and especially her bravery do, as evident when, early on, she sprints across a yard with a few leaves and a sprig of flowers while being chased by a cat that looks like a furry blowfish. Even so, while she’s 14 going on 15, and three or so inches going on four, Arrietty seems bigger because her courage, along with her fluid form and softly dappled world, come by way of the famed Japanese company Studio Ghibli, where little girls rule, if not necessarily as princesses. For all that Arrietty Clock (voiced by Bridgit Mendler) knows, her family may be the last of its kind, a lost little world in a land of giants. The wee folk beneath the floorboards in the wistful animated children’s film “The Secret World of Arrietty” don’t get underfoot: they scramble and hide, if less like scattering mice and more like practiced explorers.