Cinema 2011 #73: Arrietty

With Arrietty, the latest animated feature from Studio Ghibli, perhaps the last great animation house still working in the laborious realm of hand-drawn features, the Japanese studio finally realises the 40 year-old dream of founder Hayao Miyazaki to bring Mary Horton's much loved children's novel The Borrowers to the screen in their distinctive animé aesthetic. Directed by the youngest ever director in Ghibli history, 36 year-old Hiromasa Yonebayashi takes the helm after rising through the ranks having worked on such classic Ghibli gems as Princess Mononoke, My Neighbours the Yamadas and Howl’s Moving Castle, to here present a joyfully sweet and artistically assured mediation on nature and man’s impact on endangered species.

The film is a visual masterpiece, with Arrietty’s miniaturised world a triumph of finding the beauty in the small scale. Indeed, the design and animation of these 10-cm critters’ world is the film’s biggest success, with protracted scenes in the garden playing out like a hazy dream when accompanied by Cecile Corbel’s Breton-influenced score (just don’t mention the sickeningly sweet Arrietty’s Song from the opening credits). Anyone doubting Yonebayashi direction need only look at the set-piece in the kitchen to witness his masterful use of animation. Playing brilliantly as it does with ideas of scale and distance, Arrietty, voiced in the UK dubbing by Irish star Saoirse Ronan, and her father Pod (Mark Strong) try to nab a sugar-lump in a suburban Tokyo kitchen that looks like something akin to the Grand Canyon in terms of its dangerously vast empty space. 

Shō just wasn't getting that this Borrower was small, while that one was far away

The characterisation, however, feels somewhat lacking, with the growing friendship between Arrietty and Shō, a 12 year-old boy with a heart condition living in the house, rushed and not particularly rewarding. Olivia Coleman’s Homily, Arrietty’s mother, is a scatterbrained sugar-junkie whose constant whining is grating, and Mark Strong, mercifully not a baddy for once, mostly gets to look po-faced and make sighing noises of dis/agreement in response to the whims of Arrietty. An awful lot more fun is had with the regular humans, with Geraldine McEwan’s Haru, a spiteful housemaid with toad-like features, creepily charming while making her way around the house, whimpering like a skeksis and plotting the demise of the little people under the floorboards.

Falling more in line with last year’s youthful Ponyo, this is nowhere near as engaging as Ghibli’s best. But a stunningly beautiful way to introduce your children to the evocative animation of Japan’s finest animators, no doubt.

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Limited Release: July 29th

Runtime: 94 Mins

Certificate: G