As Studio Ghibli’s Arrietty arrives on DVD and Blu-ray in the UK, Ryan looks at a quietly beautiful feature, and the enduring magic of hand-drawn animation…
Imagine if you were a young Japanese animator working at Studio Ghibli, and one day, legendary animator Hayao Miyazaki hands over the reins to his next movie to you. I suspect even the most confident artist would be forgiven for cracking under the pressure, but with Arrietty, first-time director Hiromasa Yonebayashi delivered a film more than worthy of the studio’s name.
Having started out as an inbetween animator (one of an army of artists whose task is to draw the steps in between the lead animator’s key frames) on features including Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, Yonebayashi was eventually entrusted with Arrietty, an adaptation of Mary Norton’s much-loved children’s novel, The Borrowers.
Ghibli’s films have long blended elements of western folk legend and fairytales with Japanese lore, so Norton’s gentle 50s fantasy was a perfect fit for the studio’s unique form of storytelling. The result is a film that sits perfectly in the Ghibli canon – a slight tale that serves as a framework for a familiar Miyazaki trapping: the beauty of the natural world.
Arrietty is a 14-year-old Borrower, a race of four-inch-high humans who survive by ‘borrowing’ everyday items from the far bigger people around them. Arrietty lives beneath the floorboards of a little house deep in the Japanese countryside. Arrietty’s father, Pod, is the family’s hunter-gatherer, venturing into the world above to borrow provisions, while her mother, every bit the 50s housewife, stays at home.
Soon, though, Arrietty becomes curious about the outside world, and encourages her father to take her on one of his borrowing expeditions, and it’s during one of these that she meets Sho, a full-sized 12-year-old boy who’s tucked up in bed due to a heart condition. What follows is a gentle tale of Arrietty and Sho’s friendship, and the borrower family’s fight to remain hidden from Sho’s ornery great aunt Sadako.
If anything, Arrietty is even more whimsical and lacking in menace than the original novel – the sense of peril implied by the great aunt’s hatred of Borrowers has been lessened somewhat, as has the possibility that the frail Sho (referred to simply as the Boy in the book) might die at any moment. More narrative tension would have perhaps given Arrietty a little more bite, but it’s nevertheless a heartwarming story.
Besides, the real star of Arrietty is, as ever, Ghibli’s beautiful hand-drawn animation. Although computer-generated animation has emerged as a legitimate and remarkable craft in its own right, Ghibli’s traditional approach is perfect for the story it has to tell.
As ever, the various animals depicted in Arrietty are lovingly brought to life – from overstuffed, prowling cats to raccoon dogs to crickets to carp – but it’s the way the microcosmic world of the borrowers is illustrated that marks the film out as unique among Ghibli’s films. A single drop of tea, as it’s poured from a tiny teapot stolen from a doll’s house, is beautifully observed, for example, as is the rigidity of a leaf in a borrower’s tiny hand.
It’s inarguable that the borrowers’ world of improvised utensils and weapons (a pin for a sword, or a peg for a hairgrip) could also have been achieved with computers – but there’s a tendency, in many CG animated films, to overload the screen with texture and colour, resulting in a visually sumptuous image that nevertheless becomes exhausting over the length of a 90 minute feature.
The Ghibli animators use a painterly shorthand, where some objects are picked out with eye-catching detail, while others are sketched in with a dab of paint, and the result is a film that sooths rather than dazzles. Where some animated features can leave an audience thrilled yet rubbing their eyes following a protracted visual assault, Arrietty is positively zen-like.
Arrietty is a reminder of all that is magical about hand-drawn animation in general, and Studio Ghibli’s films in particular. It’s a medium that, more than any other, makes you forget entirely about special effects or story-telling technique, as a live-action film might, and instead immerses you in a familiar yet extraordinary world. It’s impossible to watch a Ghibli film without looking at the world a little differently afterwards, and that’s the sign of truly great filmmaking.
Arrietty is out now in the UK on DVD and Blu-ray.
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