It's a year since I saw the delightfully cute Ponyo at the cinema, and last week I saw Studio Ghibli's latest 2-D animated movie, Arrietty. Characters and aspects of the plot are taken from Mary Norton's The Borrowers: Arrietty (Saorise Ronan) and her parents Pod (Mark Strong) and Homily (Olivia Colman) are tiny people who live under the floorboards, and their very existence is threatened when sick Sho (Tom Holland) comes to stay with his aunt Haru (Geraldine McEwan) and spots Arrietty.
brilliant...
I've only seen a handful of Ghibli movies and of these Arrietty is easily the most straight forward, with an almost simplistic plot. To my mind this is a positive development as I find Japanese animation can be a little too obscure or left field on occasion, leaving me scratching my head over plot points. With Arrietty I could just sit back and marvel at the utterly beautiful traditionally animated scenes, which were at their best when depicting the veritable forest that is the garden surrounding the house inhabited by the Borrowers. These scenes could easily be freeze-framed and hung on the wall, so lush with detail and warmth were they. The sound design too was amazing - not something you can say about many films - with effective echoing and manipulated sounds to really make you get a Borrower's sense of life only a few inches tall. The voice cast were marvellous - particularly the incomparable Olivia Colman as nervous Homily.
but...My only concern is that the film simply was not long enough, I wanted to spend more time with Arrietty, Sho and everyone else, to be enveloped in their world. Ghibli doesn't do sequels, but if they did, the further adventures of the Borrowers would be a fertile source of stories and wonderment.
briefly...
Utterly charming, a feast for the eyes and ears. This is a worthy reminder that 2-D, traditional animation is not a dead art.
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