New Ghibli film: The Secret World of Arrietty

Based on The Borrowers.

:D

EDIT: Oh no wait apparently this has been out since 2010 and they're just now releasing it stateside.

That's really weird, considering I'd never heard of it except that it was in the planning stages.

edited 28th Oct '11 1:52:53 AM by Sporkaganza

I feel like I've seen this storyline somewhere before? Probably ironic since if it's originally by the author Mary Poppins, other works are more likely to be ripping off this story.

This doesn't pique my interest enough to watch, but the scenery sure looks pretty. As expected of Ghibli.

when i was at japan
it was pretty advertised widely
i should check it out even though it isnt really by miyazaki or takahata

I seem to recall there being a live-action Borrowers movie in the nineties.

There's actually a couple. Neither of them are really that good, and neither of them really paid much attention to the books.

I remember that one!

Yeah I heard about this one back in 2010 before it was released in Japan, but yesterday my friend showed me the trailer to this! Man, I'm hyped! The music was incredibly cheesy in the trailer, but no big deal, it still looks fantastic.

And of course the main guy looks like every other Studio Ghibli main guy to date, haha.

Any chance this page can get retitled with the English title "The Secret World of Arrietty"?

The film is finally out. They apparently changed the names a bit(Sho is "Shawn" for example). It's odd, since Ghibli films never really Americanized anything when Disney localized them before. :/

edited 18th Feb '12 8:58:38 PM by MrW

The Facebook status I posted about it:

Now that I've had a little more time to think about this, I think that the Americanization of this really didn't do it any favors. There are places where Japanese characters are obviously visible on boxes and other things, and the outdoors has a distinctly "Miyazaki-Japan" feel to it, but it's given a completely Western feel. I still think it's worth catching on the big screen because it makes Arrietty's perspective feel more real, and I'll definitely be picking it up on disk, but the Japanese version may end up being better.

Really? I heard that wasn't particularly distracting.

I find it amusing that Shawn's name was changed (to Shawn, I mean) but Hara's stayed the same. It's kinda Aerith and Bob-ish.

Hara was actually Haru, if I recall correctly.

It opened 9th in the box office, and uped to the 8th place by the end of the weekend. While this may not sound impressive, it's apparently considered a hit by Disney's expectations (Cartoon Brew even had a completely positive reaction to the results), and it beat Ponyo's record by one million.

Well, that's good. Ghibli's films deserve to be a success in America.

UUUUUUGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH.

Oh FOX, how you continue to amuse me.

God, Fox News is about as uninformed as those trolls who don't know what the hell they're talking about. I mean seriously? The movie is almost two years old.

On another note, I loved the movie. It's simple and some of the changes are noticeable, but it's not that distracting.

Wow. And here I though FOX couldn't get any dumber. :facepalm:

How can there be an anti-liberal message in a movie made by a guy from Japan in Japan, whose only communication would most likely be with how the dubbing turns out?

I found the film rather slow in places (but it's not that much of a problem when it's so pretty to look at) and a bit shallow, with a too-clear villain and the Sho's heart condition being only mentioned in passing. But I loved how they thought out so well the little house they build below the floorboards and the tools they use. Selective application of the Square-Cube Law, but that's inevitable. (So while I rate the film below Spirited Away, I put it above Howls Moving Castle for a plot that makes sense and an honest ending.)

My aunt mentioned that the novel terrified her when she read it. It was written during the war, and the feeling of "we're the last of our kind, if we die our heritage dies with us" is very strong, as well as the problems of growing up so isolated. In the film, in the usual Ghibli fashion, this plays out as melancholy.

I'll add that the film introduced me to the music of Cecil Corbel, a wonderful folk singer. (Yup, Studio Ghibli adapts an English novel and has the soundtrack made by a Frenchwoman, they may seem cut off from popular culture but certainly not from the wider world.) If you like Enya, Loreena Mc Kennitt or Julie Fowlis, I suggest you look up her songs, plenty to be found on Youtube, and the CD of the OST is for sale.

As an avid watcher of Fox News (dodges tomatoes), I can confidently tell you nobody watches Lou Dobbs.

Nobody.

Just got back from seeing it. The room was full of kids and their moms. Things got really quiet when they started talking about death.

cue huge backlash from helicopter moms

On having seen the movie:

• I can't think of a single flaw in it. It's not one of the more epic Ghibli films like Spirited Away, nor did it have the jaw-dropping animation effort of Ponyo but it absolutely stands on its own, both in art and in plot.

• If Dobbs had stuck to bashing the Lorax it would just be average stupidity...the Lorax wears its environmental message on its sleeve. But extending it to Arrietty is utter "what the hell was he smoking?" stupid above and beyond the fact that it didn't come from Hollywood to begin with; the themes he claims are there are nowhere to be found.

@RJ Savoy: Agreed. The soundtrack was my absolute favorite part of the movie. It was all pretty good (except maybe for David Henry's voice acting *grumble*) and everything about it was beautiful, but there was a certain quality to the music that just stood out to me.

Yeah, this was my second anime film I saw in theaters, the first being Eva 2.0, and I must say, it was very well made. The relationship between Arriety and Shawn was probably one of the highlights, and it avoided all the traps of a typical boy-girl relationship.