Arrietty and her parents are probably the last “Borrowers”, tiny creatures who lives in the nooks and crannies of an old house “Borrowing” stuff from his human occupants.
This is the latest animated feature from studio Ghibli, the best animation studio in Japan and probably in the entire world. The director is first timer Hiromasa Yonebayashi, the protégé of the legendary Hayao Miyazaki who supervised the entire project. This is very good news, with Miyazaki and Takahata getting older and openly talking about retirement is very important to pass the torch to a new generation.
The movie is quintessential Ghibli, gorgeous and poetic. It doesn’t feel at all the work of a first timer.
The story is a typical “Little gnomes” tale, actually a big children book in the UK, but it develops so beautifully that even the more cynical soon get caught in Arrietty adventures.
There is a myriad of beautiful little touches in the Borrowers world; it’s easy to recognize everyday items converted to a different use by them (like a chess piece that becomes an imposing piece of furniture for the main hall). This is mainly a story of proportions, when Arrietty meets the human we see them from her point of view, lumbering and menacing giants. Even the water with her being so small assumes a different, corpuscular, quality.
The main human lead is a letdown, too apathetic to be really engaging.
There is a very serious ecological undertone to the whole movie, with the humans destroying the borrowers’ world because they see them as pet like creature and the real possibility that the borrowers are practically extinct, but everything is kept in check and the movie never becomes pedantic.
It’s a shame that so few cinemas showed it, I hope it has better luck as a DVD/Blue ray because this is really a masterpiece.
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