Dir. Hiromasa Yonebayashi · 2010 · 94 min · 4K restoration in UK and Irish cinemas
Studio Ghibli's quietest film is back on the big screen in a new 4K restoration. Critics have long agreed that it is exquisitely made: a hand-drawn world seen from the height of a household pest, with sound design that turns a dropped pin into an event. They have split on whether that gentleness is a virtue or a limit. It is the most delicate thing Ghibli has put in a cinema, and it has the slightness that comes with that. Four stars.
Arrietty adapts the first book of Mary Norton's The Borrowers. The Clock family are tiny people who live inside the walls of a house and survive by "borrowing" small things from the humans above, never to be seen. Arrietty is the daughter, on the edge of her first borrowing trip. Upstairs lives a lonely boy recovering from a heart condition, and he sees her. That is as far as this review goes. Hayao Miyazaki and Keiko Niwa wrote the screenplay; this was Yonebayashi's first feature as director, and Cécile Corbel composed the score.
Scale is the whole trick, and critics keep returning to it. Empire calls the sense of scale "breathtakingly realised", singles out a kitchen that feels cathedral-like, and praises the way water behaves at Arrietty's size. Bob Mondello at NPR reads Yonebayashi as carrying on Miyazaki's intricate style while toning it down, and keeps the film in Arrietty's small-scale point of view.
Sound does as much as picture. Both Empire and NPR single it out: small taps and clicks that become booms from the Clocks' side of the wall, and a straight pin that rings like a sword when it is drawn. Jim Tudor at ScreenAnarchy goes furthest, saying the film may stand tall as one of the best of its year and that the 2D characters achieve "fully formed humanity". A roundup of the UK reviews at Across the Arts records The Telegraph's David Gritten saying animation does not get any better than this, and Allan Hunter at the Daily Express calling the score lovely. On a big screen and a restored print, both the painted backgrounds and the small sounds should do more work.
Almost startlingly delicate and calm.
Bob Mondello, NPR
The same calm is what some critics held against it. In the Across the Arts roundup, most ratings are four out of five, but Anthony Quinn at The Independent gave three, and Adam Woodward at Little White Lies found it "sanitised". Don Groves at SBS is the sharpest dissenter: he calls it a very slender, minor work that will mainly appeal to young children, and finds the title song overly sentimental. NPR makes the same point more kindly, noting that the slow pace and light humour may limit its appeal to children raised on louder films.
So the split is not about quality of craft. It is about whether a small story told at a whisper is enough for 94 minutes. If you need stakes that grow, you may feel it.
Tap whatever applies. There are no right answers, only a rough steer based on where critics agree and disagree.
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The restoration, overseen on the Ghibli side by Atsushi Okui, plays in IMAX in the UK and Ireland from 14 October and in cinemas nationwide from 16 October, according to Filmhounds. There are two versions: the original Japanese with English subtitles, and the 2011 English dub. I could not confirm dates for other countries, and availability varies by country, so check your local cinema listings.