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Spoony microcosm1/4/2024 All of the creative adaptations that Norton’s little people find for humans’ “lost and found” items are perfectly animated. Ghibli artists clearly perform a labor of love depicting the Borrowers’ miniature “underworld” beneath the floorboards. The changes of physical scale – from cosmic sky to large human city to intimate garden – are just the beginning of the Brobdingnagian / Lilliputian contrasts that figure so strongly in this film. Here, the observant Sho catches his first glimpse of the ladybug-like Arrietty, one of the “little people” he has heard about in his mother’s childhood stories. Together we take in the surrounding natural view and its local drama: a cat poised to pounce upon hidden prey and a crow disrupting the hunt. His slight frame is dwarfed by a tall tree bathed in a downward stream of sunlight. As the theme song beckons us to “come in the garden,” we see Sho, literally standing at the gate of a new world, cautious but curious, and caught in a complex dilemma. In one minute and fifty-two seconds of animated time, we experience a small geographical change representing large transitions: from urban to rural, present to past, and within the past, from the emotional unavailability of the corporate busyness of Sho’s divorced mother, to the rusty but genuine care-giving of his great aunt Sadako and her housekeeper, Haru. Viewers are driven out with Sho through the sharp-angled maze of urban hardscape, power lines and road-noise over a bridge toward a curvilinear oasis of protected green space where the earthy crunch of tires on dirt signals our arrival. From the sky, our view lowers briefly to a rim of purple mountains encased in smog, then down to the concrete foothills of offices and houses in a crowded city, down further to the metal box of the car he rides in, down again to visual and verbal reminders of this child’s sickly body and fragile heart. From an initial frame of white clouds floating before an infinite blue sky, the visual field instantly begins to shrink as the constraints of physical and temporal reality close in upon Sho. The story gently opens as the inner-voice of Sho, a teenage boy with a congenital heart problem, reflects on a week of his life when he faced high-risk surgery. This is a place that would be equally familiar to Satsuki, Kiki or Shizuku. Mary Norton’s original text already contains many of the storytelling elements that audiences appreciate in Ghibli productions: a nostalgic setting of highly detailed domestic and natural worlds with compelling characters whose adventures and interpersonal encounters complicate their burgeoning world views. When the creative team at Studio Ghibli takes us into the world of The Borrowers, it is in many respects a place they have helped us visit many times before. Translated as The Secret World of Arrietty, subtitled DVD.
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