|
| Home | Movies | Music | Theatre | Listings | Reviewers | About Us |
| Now Showing | Coming Soon | DVD | All Films | Cinema Listings |
Something borrowed. It can be taken as read that any release made under the famous Studio Ghibli banner will be beautiful to look at. Their lush, impeccable design is immediately recognisable and for many is theperfect antidote to the bland, computer animation that dominates cinema. As a longtime animator for the studio, Hiromasa Yonebayashi certainly delivers the aesthetic goods with Arrietty, his first foray into directing. The film is based on The Borrowers, a series of books by Mary Norton about tiny people that live beneath the floorboards and exist by borrowing items they need from humans. Arrietty (voiced by Saoirse Ronan) is one such borrower who lives with her mother and father in a country house. Their existence is threatened when a young boy comes to stay and discovers their presence. The film is enchanting to look at, with great detail given to every nook and cranny of those spaces behind skirting boards and under floorboards where Arrietty and her family live. It’s disappointing then that Arrietty as a film is suffering from a lack of imagination. This may be in small part to do with the fact that it is based on a classic children’s text; this gentle fantasy has little room for the extravagant flights of surreal fantasy seen in Spirited Away or Howl’s Moving Castle. In fact, Arrietty pares down the original source material to its bare bones, discarding several characters and any genuine sense of peril. What’s left is a story which is slight and a little lacking in incident. Arrietty herself is a likable heroine but her father (Mark Strong) and mother (Olivia Coleman) are, respectively, too stoic and too shrill. The feral garden Borrower, Spiller would have made for an interesting addition to the little world had he been on screen for more than a couple of minutes. As a result, this is a Studio Ghibli release that will work best for the very youngest of audiences. For the older fans, there is a lot to appreciate in the animation itself but little to get your teeth into. - Linda O’Brien |
