By David Germain, The Associated Press
Considering the eccentric, almost psychedelic fantasy worlds created in Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki’s tales, a story of tiny people living beneath the floorboards of a house seems almost normal.
“The Secret World of Arrietty,” from Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli, also is a pleasant antidote to the siege mentality of so many Hollywood cartoons, whose makers aim to occupy every instant of the audience’s attention with an assault of noise and images.
Slow, stately, gentle and meditative, “Arrietty” nevertheless is a marvel of image and color, its old-fashioned pen-and-ink frames vividly bringing to life the world of children’s author Mary Norton’s “The Borrowers.”
Already a hit in Japan, “Arrietty” has undergone the typically classy English-language transformation that Disney renders to Studio Ghibli’s films, among them Miyazaki’s Academy Award-winning “Spirited Away.”