Tokyo, Japan, the present day. Having to prepare for a heart operation, Sho, twelve-years-old, goes to stay at the rambling old country house of his great-aunt Maki Sadako, Sho rarely seeing either of his divorced parents. Once there, Sho is wandering around when he sees his aunt’s cat trying to attack something, but then being scared off by a crow, and catches sight of the tiny, fourteen-year-old Arrietty, one of the family of ‘little people’ barely ten centimetres high, who secretly live under the floorboards of the house and exist on things ‘borrowed’ from the humans upstairs, only taking what they need and adapting what they take from the world above to their tiny world below. Arrietty lives with her strong and silent father, Pod, and excitable mother Homily. Pod, who always tries to keep out of sight of ‘those above’, decides it is time that Arrietty learns to scavenge and borrow on a night expedition, and takes her with him on one of his night expeditions, and the two set off up into the house in search of a sugar cube and some tissues. The expedition seems to go well, but at the last moment Arrietty is spotted by the half-asleep Sho and she drops the sugar cube before scuttling to safety. Sho realises that Arrietty is real, and not something he imagined, and knowing she really needs the sugar cube, leaves it out for her the next day. Seeing Arrietty come out of hiding for it, Sho, lonely despite the best efforts of his doting great-aunt, manages to communicate with her, making it clear he is her friend and wanting to know more about her, seeing her as being as much of an outsider as he is. Arrietty comes to trust him, but Pod is adamant that, for the survival of their kind, they should never be seen by human beings, not trusting them or their motives. Pod decides it is time for the family to move on and find somewhere else to live, and is helped by the appearance of another ‘little person’, bow-wielding hunter boy Spiller, who promises to protect them from the ‘big people’. Meanwhile, Sadako’s inquisitive maid, Haru, suspects that something strange is going on, and starts to investigate the tiny noises she hears behind the walls, and the occasional little item going missing, determined to discover just what is going on in Sadako’s house. Although the English language title does not suggest it, Arrietty, the latest from Hayao Miyazaki’s Japanese animation powerhouse Studio Ghibli, is actually an animated version of the much filmed children’s classic The Borrowers, there being two British TV series, in 1977 and 1992, as well as a 1997 pic featuring Jim Broadbent and John Goodman, and the Ghibli treatment makes one wonder why it has taken so long for an animated version to be made, nearly sixty years after the book by Mary Norton was first published in 1952. Ghibli maestro and one of the masters of Japanese animation Miyazaki adapts Mary Norton’s original novel, crediting it as being ‘inspired by’, giving it the sort of story spin which has made the studio’s films popular the world over, relocating it to modern-day Tokyo, with a young boy, Sho, arriving to live with his great aunt Sadako prior to an operation, in a country house which also has some very European visual elements, and the soundtrack, by Simon Caby and Cecile Corbel, has a semi-Celtic lilt, making actual time and place almost irrelivent. Directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, his debut after fifteen years working at the studio on productions such as Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle and Ponyo, the film is often gorgeously traditional, with detailed, watercolour-like backgrounds and simple 2D foreground characters, not overloading the viewer with visual information or needless animation tricks. The material lends itself to the handling, and is still a warm and gentle tale, the story of two outsiders, meeting through what is essentially their loneliness, Sho, voiced in the UK version by Tom Holland (The Impossible), being a lonely boy living with his great-aunt, rarely seeing his parents, and Arrietty (voiced by Saoirse Ronan - The Lovely Bones / Hanna), forever forced to live in the shadows and crawlspaces by her fearful father Pod (Mark Strong - Green Lantern), and amid the gentle scenes of wildlife and nature, a Ghibli trademark, the scenes of attack by the aunt’s angry cat and an equally predatory crow add some moments of menace. What Arrietty has also shown is the sheer power the studio has, with the UK and the US having seperately-voiced versions for each territory, the US version having rather - shall we say - broader talents in the form of comedians Amy Poehler and Will Arnett, and what has also been revealed is a strict ‘no cuts’ policy, meaning the distributors in each territory may dub the films but not cut them, apparently a response to Disney’s less than sensitive handling of some earlier Studio Ghibli films in the US. As with so many of the Studio’s works it is the visuals and storytelling that really count, the effectiveness and simple beauty of which are never in doubt, and Arrietty is going to bring a staple of British children’s literature to a whole new audience.