Studio Ghibli
Bravely venturing into the garden, tiny Arrietty (voice by Bridgit Mendler) is excited to explore the big world just beyond her family’s place of hiding in “The Secret World of Arrietty.” Human boy Shawn (voice of David Henrie) is astonished when he visits the garden and discovers Arrietty (voice of Bridgit Mendler) in “The Secret World of Arrietty.”
“The Secret World of Arrietty” is an odd blend of Japanese animation, English-speaking characters, a 50-year-old children’s classic and some details about a boy that seem mildly disturbing and more suitable for a PG rating than a G.
Shawn has a bad heart — he clutches at his chest when running — and is facing an operation he fears will fail. Not to worry, he lives, but he mentions death and suggests, “Sometimes, you just have to accept the hand of fate.”
The movie is based on Mary Norton’s book “The Borrowers,” in which the boy is recovering from rheumatic fever but not talking about death. The novel was set in and around an English country house — here moved to Japan — where borrowers secretly live beneath the floorboards.
‘The Secret World of Arrietty’
Starring: Voices of Bridgit Mendler, Amy Poehler, Will Arnett, Carol Burnett.
Rating: G.
They were among the original recyclers, borrowing postage stamps to hang on the wall as artwork, turning blotting paper into rugs and nails into hooks.
The parents, Pod and Homily, live with their daughter, Arrietty, about to turn 14. Pod is the hunter and gatherer who creeps and leaps upstairs to filch a cube of sugar here, a tissue there, while his wife tends to the home and worries on everyone’s behalf.
On Arrietty’s very first borrowing trip she is spied by the visiting boy, Shawn. “Don’t be afraid, OK? … My mother used to tell me stories about the little people who lived under the floors,” he says, but she panics and retreats.
Other borrowers spotted by “beans,” as the borrowers call human beings, disappeared in the past. Arrietty senses that Shawn is good-hearted and would never harm her or her family, but not everyone in the upstairs household can be trusted with their lives.
Fourteen years ago this week, a live-action version of “The Borrowers” opened. John Goodman was a lawyer aiming to cheat a family out of the inherited home they unknowingly shared with the borrowers. Jim Broadbent portrayed one of the little folk in a movie marked by a British sensibility to the humor and whimsy.
“The Secret World of Arrietty” was first released in Japan in 2010 where it was an enormous hit.
It then migrated to Asia and Europe and now arrives in the States with dialogue dubbed by Americans, notably Bridgit Mendler as Arrietty, Amy Poehler and Will Arnett (here sounding like a younger Clint Eastwood) as her parents, David Henrie as Shawn and Carol Burnett as a suspicious housekeeper with a mean streak.
Studio Ghibli, a Japanese animation studio, made “The Secret World of Arrietty,” and its style is closer to anime and hand drawn than the flashy, primary colored universe of, say, “Cars.” The world of the borrowers, where a leaf doubles as a makeshift umbrella and a knight from a chess game is a sculpture tucked into a niche, is beautifully imagined.
Children may naturally appreciate a world in which everyone and everything looms large, but they may miss the environmental message and find the pacing slow, the tone quiet and the humor in short supply.
An intense sense of play and wonder seems lost in translation, and turning Shawn’s parents into divorced workaholics seems a modern but unnecessarily harsh touch.
Movie editor Barbara Vancheri: bvancheri@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1632. Read her blog: www.post-gazette.com/madaboutmovies.
First published on February 17, 2012 at 12:00 am