ARRIETTY (2010)

Though Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s feature directorial debut, Arrietty / 借りぐらしのアリエッティ / The Secret World of Arrietty, is generally a sweet and endearing tale, the Studio Ghibli film is at its best when it transcends such labels to achieve resonance and insight. Following the lives of a family of Borrowers, human beings the size of insects, it’s fascinating to witness the ways in which the regular world takes on an almost fantastical bent for these beings. The sound design isn’t just attentive to the hums and creaks of an ordinary household; it keenly recognises that such odd and seemingly discordant noises, which are so nondescript as to fade into the background of our aural awareness in daily life, appear frighteningly alien to the Borrowers. As for the animation style, not only is it a joy to behold throughout this feature, it somehow manages to make objects as simple as a kitchen sink appear alien and vaguely threatening without having to transform them into something they’re not.

Much of the wonder (and terror) of this lifestyle is exemplified by a scene in which Arrietty (Mirai Shida), a teenage girl who is beginning to learn the ways of her people, traverses this unfamiliar terrain with her father, Pod (Tomokazu Miura). It’s here that this delicate and unhurried narrative is genuinely striking, with scant dialogue provided so that the thrilling nature of this quest and Pod’s ingenuity take centre stage. It’s in these glimpses of what the Borrowers’ lives entail that Arrietty is briefly invigorating, though that’s unfortunately a rarity throughout its 95-minute runtime. Instead, the film is more devoted to a romance plot between Arrietty and a teenage boy, Shō (Ryunosuke Kamiki), who is about to undergo a heart operation soon (with low chances of survival). He has moved into the home beside the Borrowers’ tiny habitat for a brief period and comes across Arrietty in the garden not long after arriving.

This is when the film reduces itself to being merely sweet, and while it resolves each of its narrative set-ups, very little exploring goes on here. Perhaps that’s what makes this literal exploration of Shō’s mother’s home by Arrietty and Pod feel daring and alive, whereas the rest of the plot is content to rest on a benevolent yet banal sweetness that has little to offer on a thematic or emotional level. The two youngsters are endearing enough for us to want them to succeed, with a worthwhile will-they-won’t-they interplay regarding a potential romantic relationship, or whether Arrietty and her family will wind up living with Shō and the other humans in this home. When we learn of Shō’s health troubles, there’s clearly something worth grasping onto, but this ends up being treated about as half-heartedly as the rest of this movie’s emotional anchors, gradually becoming unmoored from its post and drifting idly towards a mild ending.

Only so much time can be spent admiring the tiny furniture and belongings in Arrietty’s miniature home before a compelling story needs to kick into place (though that takes nothing away from how stunning these environments are, which, alongside these characters’ interactions in them, are still more than enough reason to check out this feature film). As for Arrietty’s plot, it’s clear that, like many of Studio Ghibli’s efforts, a critique of human beings’ destruction of natural environments or persecution of other species is at play here. In this case, it’s expressed through Haru (Kirin Kiki), the housekeeper, who is hell-bent on vanquishing the Borrowers. Why, exactly? This goes unmentioned. Her enthusiasm in kidnapping Arrietty’s mother, Homily (Shinobu Otake), is rivalled only by the film’s disinterest in explaining such motives and this miniature family’s innate terror of human beings, who they insist would snuff them out of existence if they were aware of the Borrowers’ presence. One can surmise why this is—tiny humans would be a terrifying surprise, especially given how fearful most people are of small creatures like rats or, smaller still, spiders—but it feels as if the story needs an additional layer of folklore amongst both humans and their tiny counterparts to justify this perceived animosity.

It’s also necessary to address the flaws in this thinking, since Shō’s parents and grandparents hadn’t just seen the Borrowers in the past, they greatly appreciated them and even sought them out. This is a plot point that conveniently bats itself out of existence not long after making its introduction, since human beings in this world have to appear terrifying to the Borrowers. Hence the bitter and sadistic housekeeper, who gleefully plucks Homily up and keeps her captive in a glass jar. If Haru had been truly cruel—for instance, if she planned on boiling Homily for a dish she is preparing—we might not have needed any explanation for her behaviour, but just as importantly, it would have added a sinister edge to a story whose endearing qualities are too mild to truly resonate.

It’s clear that Haru isn’t exactly part of the family, since her role as the help isn’t forgotten for a second. Is she resentful of her status in this home, or in wider society? Does taking out her frustrations and powerlessness on even more helpless figures bring her the kind of satisfaction that she can never accrue from her working life? These potential explanations don’t track when one considers that Haru looked upon a gorgeous miniature home for the Borrowers with the same degree of enthusiasm and reverence as Shō did.

Focusing on class would, presumably, take away from the bare-bones simplicity of the film’s sole social message, about how any and all species should be wary of the big, bad humans. But by shying away from more focused insight, intrigue, or even a convincing degree of malice, there’s little to appreciate about such surface-level ideas, especially when Hayao Miyazaki, the most well-known and acclaimed of the Studio Ghibli directors, has already directed numerous films that artfully and meaningfully grapple with the destructive tendencies of human beings towards the natural world.

It’s also possible that attaching some definable personality traits to this antagonist would only add to Arrietty’s runtime and hamper the film’s safe capitalisation of how charming these tiny characters are. It’s a frustrating instance of irony that a movie centred on an entirely different group of beings, opening up a whole new world for viewers to explore and test their morality, is so uninterested in the interior worlds the Borrowers and humans inhabit.

Despite her valiant efforts, Arrietty is constantly resigned to feeling as though she has failed her family, made all the more conflicting given her growing interest in Shō, with her parents constantly insisting that interacting with him—or any human—could lead to their deaths. With a protagonist who’s caught in an unwinnable position, Yonebayashi’s feature debut starts out quite moving. But it’s as if the film is never able to enter second gear, coasting on a one-note story that happily plays its sweet yet safe melody again and again. Even Arrietty‘s bittersweet ending feels as if the powerhouse animation studio is simply re-playing a compilation of its greatest hits, with this weaker entry in Studio Ghibli’s filmography proving to be more arresting for its visuals and general mood than its plot or characters.

JAPAN | 2010 | 95 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | JAPANESE

Cast & Crew

director: Hiromasa Yonebayashi.
writers: Hayao Miyazaki & Keiko Niwa (based on ‘The Borrowers’ by Mary Norton).
voices: Mirai Shida, Ryunosuke Kamiki, Shinobu Otake, Keiko Takeshita, Tatsuya Fujiwara, Tomokazu Miura & Kirin Kiki (Japanese) • Saoirse Ronan, Tom Holland, Olivia Colman, Mark Strong, Geraldine McEwan, Luke Allen-Fale & Phyllida Law (English).