SMALL WORLD

Even if, like me, you’re not an especially big fan of the Japanese anime style, don’t miss The Secret World of Arrietty. We’re only in February, but I would have to have an outstanding year at the movies indeed for this 2-D animated feature from Japan’s Studio Ghibli not to be somewhere on my 2012 top ten list.

The film is a loose adaptation, & perhaps a deepening, of Mary Norton’s 1952 British children’s book The Borrowers, by Hayao Miyazaki, the genius behind the 2001 masterpiece Spirited Away & other extraordinary Studio Ghibli works. On Arrietty, Miyazaki is credited as screenwriter & “planner”; the director, making his feature debut, is Hiromasa Yonebayashi.

The Borrowers of the original title are a race of insect-sized people who reside inside the walls or under the floorboards of human houses & survive by making sorties into the house proper to “borrow” tiny, unnoticeable amounts of whatever they need—a sugar cube, maybe, or a pin—from their human hosts, to whom they refer as “beans.” Our adolescent heroine Arrietty lives in bourgeois comfort with her taciturn father Pod & her hysteria-prone mother Homily beneath a closet in a lovely home in the Tokyo suburbs.

Arrietty (voiced, in the U.S. version, by Disney Channel star Bridgit Mendler) has a taste for adventure that outstrips her caution with regard to a cardinal rule of the Borrower lifestyle: Never being seen by humans. Shawn (David Henrie, another Disney Channel favorite), a sensitive human boy who’s been sent to stay with relatives in the house while he waits to have heart surgery, becomes aware almost at once of Arrietty’s existence, & thus of her family’s. The ensuing tale hinges on the guarded bond that develops between them.

The Secret World of Arrietty doesn’t have the epic, preternatural grandeur of Spirited Away or some of the other Ghibli stunners, but I think that for this very reason it may please Western audiences even more, in some ways, than those films. The scale of the story makes Arrietty less ambitious & more delicate, but also more direct & focused, & perhaps more conventionally charming (& also, for younger kids, less scary).

Still, Miyazaki & Yonebayashi fill the movie with dazzling touches—the enormity of the teardrops that form in Borrower eyes, or the tea drops that fill their miniscule cups, the insects that routinely cross Arrietty’s path or the pillbug that rolls up when she idly picks it up, the way the sound of a rustling shirt is used to give a sense of Shawn’s colossal size—that leave us wide-eyed. Arrietty is richly imagined, funny, high-spirited, exciting, suspenseful & touching, yet also blessedly quiet. It’s pure fantasy, yet intensely in tune with the natural world. It’s deeply refreshing.

RIP to dancer & actress Zina Bethune, killed at 66 in a horrifying traffic accident in Los Angeles (possibly a hit-&-run; the initial police reports are uncertain), & to Mets & Expos great Gary Carter, departed at just 57.

Cancel your Saturday night plans—Your Humble Narrator is slated to be a guest at 7 p.m. tomorrow on 9.23 KTAR's The Jay Lawrence Show, along with my pal & Phoenix Film Critics Society colleague David Ramsey, to talk movies with the redoubtable Jay.