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Arrietty is fourteen and belongs to a family of Borrowers, four-inch people who live beneath the floorboards of a human house and take small items nobody will miss. When a sickly boy named Sho sees her during her first borrowing expedition, the contact violates the only rule that keeps her family safe. Their tentative friendship develops against the practical certainty that being seen means the family must leave, and neither of them can change the arithmetic of that situation. Every borrowing expedition carries the risk that ends the family's life there entirely.
⚠ Background — may contain spoilers
Directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi in his feature debut from a screenplay by Hayao Miyazaki, and adapted from Mary Norton's novel The Borrowers, Arrietty was a substantial commercial success and earned strong international reception. Its sound design, treating ordinary household noises as enormous from a Borrower's perspective, is frequently praised. The film's scale-based visual invention gave Studio Ghibli an opportunity to render familiar domestic spaces as genuinely alien terrain, which remains its most distinctive achievement. Its use of scale to make ordinary rooms feel enormous remains the film's central achievement throughout.
An entertaining and gorgeous family film that lovingly tells its story, coupled to a good UK dub that nonetheless suffers from seemingly low production values.
There are many moments of charm throughout, but those moments don't quite connect to make the story work as well as it should, leaving something of a disjointed result.
Established in 2002 and launched as an independent event in 2014, the Tokyo Anime Award Festival (TAAF) is an annual international animation festival hosted in Tokyo, Japan. Operating under the slogan "TOKYO is the HUB of contemporary ANIMATION," its goal is to discover new talent, promote animation culture, and celebrate outstanding works worldwide.
