Studio Ghibli is often assumed to be the animation house that Hayao Miyazaki built, but Miyazaki has directed only nine of its 17 features to date. Four were made by studio cofounder Isao Takahata and four by four different directors. These latter four, however, are all immediately identifiable as Studio Ghibli products, from their spunky teenage protagonists to their pictorial realism in everything from the play of shadows through the trees to the raising of sticky windows.
The latest, "Kari-gurashi no Arrietty (The Borrowers)," features direction by veteran Ghibli animator Hiromasa Yonebayashi and a script by Miyazaki himself. It is a simply told, beautifully animated delight that, like the best Ghibli films, speaks straight to the heart and imagination of the child in all of us.
Like the 2008 "Gedo Senki (Tales from Earthsea)," which was directed by Miyazaki's son Goro from a novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, "Arrietty" is based on a classic of British children's fantasy literature: Mary Norton's 1952 novel "The Borrowers." But whereas "Gedo Senki," as well as much of Miyazaki's own oeuvre, is full-bore fantasy, with magical powers, mythical beasts and all the rest, "Arrietty" unfolds in a present-day Japan in which no one but birds can fly. True, its 14-year-old title heroine (voiced by Mirai Shida), together with her mother Homily (Shinobu Otake) and father Pod (Tomokazu Miura), stand only 10 cm tall, but these "tiny people" are ordinary in every other respect.