Arrietty (US: The Secret World of Arrietty)
(Karigurashi no Arietti, 借りぐらしのアリエッティ,
lit. Arrietty the Borrower)
Director – Hiromasa Yonebayashi – 2010 – Japan – Cert. U – 94m
*****
A teenage girl under a foot high is found by a kindly boy with a heart condition who has come to his aunt’s home on the city’s outskirts to convalesce – back out in a 4K remaster in UK IMAX cinemas on Wednesday, October 14th, then in regular UK cinemas on Friday, October 16th through Sunday, October 18th
His Aunt Sadako (voice / 2010 Japanese dub: Keiko Takashita; 2010 StudioCanal UK English dub: Phillida Law) drives Sho (voice / 2010 Japanese dub: Ryonosuke Kamiki; 2010 StudioCanal UK English dub: Tom Holland) to the house on the city’s outskirts he is visiting. On arrival, he sees a crow having a spat with the cat, which in turn is taking an interest in a group of plants in which he spots a teenage girl less than a foot high. After he’s been called inside the house, the girl, Arrietty (voice / 2010 Japanese dub: Mirai Shida; 2010 StudioCanal UK English dub: Saoirse Ronan) escapes the cat through the grille into the basement, where she outruns grasshoppers to enter her family’s cosy, miniature cottage accessible by a small flight of steps. Her mother Homily (voice / 2010 Japanese dub: Shinobu Otake; 2010 StudioCanal UK English dub: Olivia Colman) scolds her for going outside, but is thrilled with her present of a bay leaf.
Her father Pod (voice / 2010 Japanese dub: Tomokatsu Miura; 2010 StudioCanal UK English dub: Mark Strong) is aware of the boy, whose presence he doesn’t think will scupper Arrietty’s first ‘borrowing’ trip since the boy appears to be ill. Upstairs, Sho’s aunt introduces him to the housekeeper Haru (voice / 2010 Japanese dub: Kirin Kiki from Villain, Lee Sang-il, 2010; Sweet Bean, Naome Kawase, 2015; Shoplifters, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2018; 2010 StudioCanal UK English dub: Geraldine McEwan) who is there should he need anything. On her first borrowing trip, Homily asks if Pod and Arrietty can bring back a sugar cube and some tissue. They get the first, but Arrietty drops it from a tabletop (which is the height to her the fourth floor of a building would be to us) as she and Pod are taking some tissue from a box when she spots the boy wide awake in bed. They return without either item, although Arrietty does bring back a sewing pin which she puts through the side of her dress as if it were a giant sword.
That night and the next day, it rains. After the rain has stopped, Sho leaves the sugar cube near the grille, but Arietty tells her father who orders her not to touch it, and that if the humans discover where they live, the family will have to move. This doesn’t stop Arrietty from returning the cube to Sho’s room, but she is attacked by a crow on his window sill. In the ensuing scuffle, Sho rescues her while the bird’s head gets stuck in the window screen, arousing the suspicions of Haru, attracted by the commotion. Sho seems friendly, but Arrietty nevertheless makes a swift exit.
Aunt Sadako shows Sho and Haru the dolls’ house interior, built by her father in the hope the ‘little people’ would come sand stay in it, which they sadly never did.
Pod comes home having twisted his ankle in a rainstorm, supported by a young borrower boy named Spiller (voice / 2010 Japanese dub: Tatsuya Fujiwara; 2010 StudioCanal UK English dub: Luke Allen-Gale). He thinks they must move because the humans have seen them. One day, Sho’s hands unexpectedly appear and replace the kitchen wall with the nicer one from the dolls’ house. He hastily covers up the underfloor house when he hears Haru returning; she finds a small, borrowed bowl he’s dropped.
Arietty finds Sho relaxing in the garden; he tells her he is having a heart operation next week, and may die. They are interrupted by the sound of Homily, who has been found along with the family home band caught by Haru. Now it will be up to Sho and Arietty to rescue Homily before Haru can get the pest control people in…
Although the film was planned by Hayao Miyazaki, former Ghibli animator Yonebayashi was given the job as director. If Miyazaki’s touch is evident in, for example, scenes where either Sho or Arietty lie back and bask in the sun, as many protagonists do in his films, Yonebayashi seems a good choice for the material with the melancholy of Sho anticipating the overall melancholy mood of When Marnie Was There (2014), Yonebayashi’s other adaptation of a classic English children’s book for Ghibli before he moved on to form his own outfit Studio Ponoc.
The narrative is finely balanced between the adventurous Arrietty herself, the largely bedridden Sho, and the suspicious housekeeper Haru whose attitude to the little people living on the premises suggest a nasty streak in her character. Indeed, a couple of times Haru is seen to sneak back into hiding behind something after spying on the boy, and at one key point (when Arietty is about to go to him for help) locks Sho in his room.
Arrietty’s borrowing trips with her father are a wonder to behold as the pair make their way up winched lifts in cavity walls or work their way along ledges on a pathway of nails hammered into wood. The animation is full of wonderful touches, as, for instance, when Arrietty climbs up ivy and you see each leaf moving in turn as she ascends. Or the clothes line peg she uses as a hair grip, which she gives to Sho in a moving parting scene towards the end.
As in Mary Norton’s 1952 source novel The Borrowers, the first in a series of five, there’s an overall fascination with how little people would survive in a human world by co-existing out of sight of the larger species. This element is what makes the books work, and it forms the very centre of the film too.
The book was previously filmed several times, notably as British live action fantasy The Borrowers (Peter Howitt, 1997), a film a little undercut by being aimed at the American market and the imposition of an eviction plot. Although Arietty’s humans are given Japanese names and their house is situated on the edge of a big city (presumably Tokyo) with Japanese architecture clearly visible, the house and garden beneath and in which most of the action takes place could easily be read as English.
The film is being released in both Japanese subtitled and UK English dubbed versions. The latter was used for this review, and while I generally prefer to watch films in their original language, StudioCanal’s 2010 dub does an excellent job with a British rather than a US voice cast, which is welcome given that the book is English and set in England, and quite possibly adds something to an English viewer’s experience of the film.
As a bonus, the UK dub includes the screen debut of Tom Holland, early roles from Saorise Ronan and Olivia Colman, veteran actresses Geraldine McEwan (her final film, immediately following voice acting on Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Nick Park & Steve Box, 2005 and A Matter of Loaf and Death, Nick Park, 2008) and Phyllida Law, and a scene-stealing turn from character actor Mark Strong, who plays the father Pod with just the right amount of quiet authority.
There’s nothing else quite like the film in the Ghibli back catalogue, and the chance to see it back on the big screen is most welcome.
Arrietty is back out in a 4K remaster in IMAX cinemas on Wednesday, October 14th, then in regular cinemas in the UK on Friday, October 16th through Sunday, October 18th.
Trailer: