Arrietty (2010)

basics...
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. 

Ponyo (2008)

Ponyo is hands down the cutest movie I've seen for ages! At least since last year's Up! The deceptively simple-sounding plot that mirrors The Little Mermaid in the central sea creature character's desire to become humour does little to explain how wonderful the experience of Ponyo really is. 

I've seen Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, Hayao Miyazaki's (sort of the Japanese Walt Disney) eariler animated films for Studio Ghibli and I'd enjoyed them, but with some reservations due to some of the inexplicable weirdness that Japanese animations often involve. Ponyo is much more linear, and simpler, but without being boring or childish in any way. I was completely entranced by the touching story of little Sōsuke and his new friend Ponyo, a tadpole-like creature, who, when she tastes human blood, begins to turn into a human child. Ponyo discovers she likes being human, and she loves her new friend, but her father, Fujimoto is king of the sea and doesn't want to let Ponyo go.

The 2-D animation looked gorgeous on the cinema screen, and the score was lucious. I saw the English-dubbed version that has been produced by Pixar creator and all-round animation messiah John Lasseter and it was a seemless blend of Japanese animation, with it's slightly jerky style, and an all-star American voice cast that includes Tina Fey, Matt Damon, Liam Neeson, Betty White, Lily Tomlin and Cloris Leachman (the latter I'd only just seen in the final 1978 episode of The Muppet Show: Season 2!). The rather twee song over the end credits with the lyrics 'Ponyo, Ponyo, fishy in the sea' has been in my head and not left for days! I walked out of the cinema beaming and when I think of Ponyo it still brings a smile to my face. Wonderful.