

The main relationship in the film reminded me a lot of the "impossible" friendship between ET and Elliott (ET), and Wilbur and Charlotte (Charlotte's Web). The preschool set, however, is not the target audience for this film. There are some moments in which characters appear to be in life-threatening peril, and my son would not have handled those scenes very well at all. The film is very gentle and contains very little that will bother any child who has made it through "Toy Story." I ended up deciding the film was not appropriate for my very sensitive 4 year old. This one roughly follows the story of "The Borrowers." The film does an amazing job of illustrating the way a house looks to a 5 inch person. I loved "The Littles" as a child and am thrilled to see a high quality animated film made that captures the spirit of that genre of story. Or the sound made by a straight pin (the clang of a sword) when it's drawn from the folds of Arrietty's tunic.I am a huge fan of the "little people" genre. The filmmakers' approach is gentle and slightly humor-challenged, perhaps because they've invested so much imagination in capturing the world from brave little Arrietty's perspective - divining the texture of a raindrop, say (thick and viscous), when it's nearly the size of your fist and must pour from a dollhouse-sized teapot spout. The characters deal with friendship across cultural divides, the clever recycling of resources, frank talk of illness and the finality of death - and, when the Clock family realizes they need to move on, a shorthand look at the plight of refugees.Īll of this while clambering from nail to nail and down staple-staircases inside the walls of the house, rappelling off a kitchen counter, and careening through a garden where even a close-cropped lawn amounts to an obstacle course. While there's not much in the way of incident - just the cat, the crow, the housekeeper (voiced by Carol Burnett) and Shawn's illness - the animators slip quite a bit of socially conscious content into a narrative that's chiefly about the ingenious ways the Clock family gets around in what is for them a wildly oversized landscape. Shawn is lonely and wants to make friends, the elder Clocks are as terrified as their daughter is curious, and therein hangs the tale. A pea being enough to feed the whole family, they should be able to do this unnoticed, but when Arrietty drops a sugar cube, she's discovered. Shawn (voiced by David Henrie) spots the diminutive Arrietty (Bridgit Mendler) when she and her father (Will Arnett) are foraging for food.
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Miyazaki was only peripherally involved in Arrietty, but director Hiromasa Yonebayashi appears to be a devoted disciple, domesticating the master's teeming visual style somewhat but maintaining his emphasis on intricate graphics, strong independent female characters and stories rooted in real-world concerns.Īrrietty's story, taken from the first book in Mary Norton's children's series The Borrowers, centers on the tiny Clock family - 14-year-old Arrietty Clock and her parents - who live in the walls of a house where a boy with a heart condition is resting up for an operation. That's because Arrietty is the latest animated opus from Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation house co-founded by the great auteur Hayao Miyazaki, director of such international animated smashes as the eco-friendly Princess Mononoke, the values-oriented Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle, which preceded Pixar's Up with its manse-on-the-move storyline. Delicate, however, comes with the territory.


In a hyperactive kid-flick universe populated by kickboxing pandas, rampaging chipmunks and tap-dancing penguins, The Secret World of Arrietty - the tale of a girl who's barely 4 inches tall and possesses neither superpowers nor a toymaker's imprimatur - is almost startlingly delicate and calm.Ĭalm, let's note, despite the presence of a marauding house cat, a raven who'd love to make a quick snack of our heroine, and a housekeeper determined to root out the little people who live beneath her floorboards.
