When it comes to the quality of the product, the world of animated film is dominated at the moment by Japan's Studio Ghibli and America's Pixar. And with the latter's current offering, Cars 2, being something of a disappointment, Ghibli's entrancing Arrietty is the clear choice for a family outing this summer. The film's youngish director, Hiromasa Yonebayashi, worked as an animator on such Ghibli classics as Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle and Ponyo, but the idea of an animated version of Mary Norton's The Borrowers has been a long-cherished project of Ghibli's great film-maker Hayao Miyazaki, and the original Japanese title translates as "Arrietty and the Borrowers".
Several generations of children have now grown up on Mary Norton's books about sweet-natured little people living beneath the floorboards of British houses and supporting their modest lifestyles by "borrowing" their simple necessities from the ordinary human occupants. They have no special powers and they are not, in any real sense, thieves, borrowing only things that have been discarded or will not be missed – an old hat pin, for instance, or a cube of sugar. The first book was published to considerable acclaim in 1952, five years before the same idea was used by Richard Matheson for his celebrated novel and horror flick The Incredible Shrinking Man. In Matheson's story, a suburban husband, after exposure to nuclear radiation, steadily shrinks until he is forced to live first in a doll's house and then in a matchbox in the basement, fending off spiders with a pin he wields like a sword. There have been several TV series based on Norton's books, but only one film, Peter Hewitt's 1997 The Borrowers, in which, symbolically, the full-size people living upstairs in a timeless London house are American while the eccentric tiny folk living by ingenious scavenging below are English. It seemed to suggest that the borrowers were a non-productive, disregarded underclass. The result wasn't bad but lacked magic and wonder.
The Ghibli version is set in a verdant Tokyo suburb, but except for a pair of dim-witted insect-exterminators the people don't look particularly Japanese. As in Norton's original, a sickly teenage boy comes to stay at a rather grand house with his pleasant aunt and a surly old housekeeper, and on his arrival he spots Arrietty, one of the little people, as his own father and grandfather had also done as children. Arrietty is a pretty 14-year-old borrower who's been protected by her concerned mother and father from human contact, a little reminiscent of Miranda in The Tempest, and like her is swept away on encountering the dangerous, brave new world of humans from upstairs. The movie is beautifully drawn, universal in its combination of east and west, and has a narrative that flows as elegantly as its graphic line. There are wonderful sequences: Pod the father taking Arrietty on his first borrowing expedition in the house upstairs; a tour of the human family's elegant Edwardian doll's house; a crow trapped in a mesh window screen as it swoops down in an attempt to seize Arrietty; her mother imprisoned in a bottle by the vindictive housekeeper; an escape in a floating tea kettle to a new home.
At the heart of the film, however, is the tender, trusting friendship between Sho, the boy of the house, and Arrietty. Theirs is a beautiful, perfect love, but ultimately doomed like so many relationships in myths and fairytales. This moving, amusing and resonant tale also touches on environmental and ecological concerns, on xenophobia and the fear of the threatening other. And it has taken on new meanings about the respect and preservation of disappearing species and the need to treasure and recycle valuable resources.
Arrietty is being shown in two versions in this country, a Japanese one, and one dubbed into English. Given the choice last week, I opted for the dubbed one, which I normally do with foreign animated pictures, because after all we're not concerned here with losing the actors' real voices the way one is with customary dubbing. Of course I noticed a superior smile on the faces of some purist colleagues as they descended to the basement viewing theatre (the appropriate place for those who sympathise with the borrowers) to hear the Japanese version. But all the children present attended the dubbed version upstairs and seemed to enjoy it hugely. I might have felt differently had we been invited to see Disney's dubbed version, with teenage American accents. But I doubt if a better cast could be found anywhere than the British actors assembled for Arrietty by Eric Fellner and Tim Bevan, who were also the producers of the 1997 The Borrowers. Saoirse Ronan is a heartbreaking Arrietty, Mark Strong a splendidly decent dad.
• The following correction was printed in the Observer's For the record column, Sunday 7 August 2011. Actress Saoirse Ronan is Irish, not British (Film of the Week, New Review) and Frank Buxton (Feedback, New Review) is not an Member of Parliament, he's a member of the Institute of Physics.
