The Secret World of Arrietty

Since the seventies Hayao Miyazaki had dreamt of adapting Mary Norton’s The Borrowers. Finally in the Ghibli studio in 2010 he was able to make a film both for children and for adults who used to play with tiny toys or watch ants march between tufts of grass. The premise is fantastical: a family of little creatures lives in a crack in a farmhouse wall – they look perfectly normal except for the fact that they are the size of a human palm. When you’re just a couple of inches tall, you must be careful not to bump into something dangerous, like a cat or a human. Secretly, however, a borrower, teenage Arrietty, forms a friendship with a human boy. The atmosphere is gentle. We can observe flowers, everyday objects, and the interior of a dollhouse up close. Along with an unobtrusive ecological message, we also get some practical advice: if you lose a safety pin or a button, just look into the mousehole.

Karolina Kostyra

Hiromasa Yonebayashi (b. 1973) is a Japanese animator and anime director. He started his career in 1996 as an animator for such renowned films of Studio Ghibli as Princess Mononoke (1997) and Spirited Away (2001). His debut as a director came in 2010 with The Secret World of Arrietty, after which he has directed one more film for Ghibli, When Marnie Was There (2014), and one for his own company Studio Ponoc, Mary and the Witch’s Flower (2017).