SPOILER-FREE REVIEW
Possessing absolutely charming animation and music, Arrietty represents Studio Ghibli on a much smaller scale, reaching the same visual heights but not quite equalling the studio’s narrative bests.
It’s totally appropriate that Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s Arrietty, a film about little people, also turns out to be a condensed and remarkably compact version of your typical Studio Ghibli film. But as the saying goes: size isn’t everything. Contained within Yonebayashi’s film, you’ll find just about all the qualities that have made Ghibli’s work famous all around the world. The studio’s films tend to fall along a spectrum, with films made specifically for children like Ponyo and Totoro on one end and adult dramas like Grave of the Fireflies on the other. True, Arrietty falls much closer to the former, and as such adults may have a harder time with its relative lack of complexity and nuance, but truth be told, I still found there was plenty to appreciate: namely its sense of gentleness and warmth.
An adaptation of Mary Norton’s 1952 novel The Borrowers, Yonebayashi effortlessly translates its story about a family of little people, referred to as Borrowers, a few inches tall living in secret under the floors and behind the walls of a normal human household, venturing out to borrow items from its inhabitants in order to survive. One night, Arrietty, a fourteen-year-old Borrower, accompanies her father Pod as he ventures out into the house in search of supplies, only to find herself face-to-face with a human boy named Sho. As a result of some unspoken history, the Borrowers regard being seen by humans as potentially calamitous, given our apparent propensity for destruction. Life changes for Arrietty and her family, who must now find a new place to live.
That’s about all I can actually say about the plot, because that’s essentially all that happens. Those looking for the narrative and thematic complexity of films like Spirited Away will likely find themselves disappointed by Arrietty, whose story is fairly basic in nature. At the very least, its characters are compelling. With that familiar streak of bravery (common for Ghibli protagonists) and more than enough guts for someone twice her size, if not even more so, Arrietty may just be one of the studio’s most compelling and likeable characters. Her father is pleasingly stoic while her frequently hysterical, anxious mother offers some hilarious comic relief. It all falls a little flat, given that Arrietty’s human friend Sho is comparatively bland and not characterised nearly as well as she is, with a jarringly bleak outlook on life as his predominant personality trait. They go up against the irascible housekeeper Haru, a mildly malicious non-villain thanks to the writing, which scarcely bothers to attribute to her any sort of motivation that explains her actions.
It does however feature some of Studio Ghibli’s best animation. The film’s animators have transformed your typical house into a gargantuan alien landscape. We get to see our world from Arrietty’s perspective, and appreciate the sheer size of our everyday items and furniture as she sees them. Early on in the film, Arrietty journeys out into the house at night, hopping across loose nails and emerging out from behind a china cabinet only to find herself in the kitchen: a mundane place transformed into a foreboding expanse. She stares in wonder at the fridge, a mysterious black monolith in the distance, as her father abseils down the side of the cabinet to the floor, which seems a long way down. Her adventures into our world feel like true expeditions, the task of retrieving a single sugar cube becomes a delicate operation, while stealing a single tissue from its box requires both Arrietty and her father to work together to pull it out; because of their size, it’s entirely rigid to them. Later, as Arrietty escapes the torrential rain, she brushes off stray droplets of water the size of her hands from her clothes before continuing onwards. Their world is intricately detailed, meticulously scaled and ingeniously designed, imagining just how these Borrowers would take and improvise with our everyday objects to suit their own needs.
There are spots of adorable animation, like the sight of Arrietty holding on for dear life to a leaf fluttering in the wind as she’s assailed by a crow, that you can’t help but be charmed by. The music and score, composed by Cécile Corbel who happens to be the first non-Japanese composer to work with Studio Ghibli, has its own distinct identity, cobbled together from remarkably eclectic sources, blending Celtic folk music with guitar, accordion and even bagpipes. It lends the film a wonderful extra spark.
Perhaps the best thing about it is that, after watching Arrietty, there’s a small part of me deep inside that wants to keep a lookout for these Borrowers in my own home, to watch for little people sneaking out from under the floorboards to scavenge for sugar cubes and tissues. To have that sense of childhood wonder back is no small feat. If you’re looking for a simple, comforting movie to watch then Arrietty, a film I’d describe as Studio Ghibli but miniaturised, is far from a bad choice.
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