'The Secret World of Arrietty' Finds Beauty in the Mundane

G; 94 min.

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.

What U.S. audiences get is a hybrid -- the grandly fluid picture-book imagery of first-time feature director Hiromasa Yonebayashi, a veteran Studio Ghibli animator, merged with an English-language rendering of Miyazaki's screenplay, Oscar-winning sound designer Gary Rydstrom directing a Hollywood voice cast that includes Carol Burnett, Amy Poehler and Will Arnett.

Previously adapted in the 1997 live-action slapstick comedy The Borrowers, Norton's stories follow the adventures of a family of teeny people who live off things scavenged from nature or from the oversize human world that's unaware of the existence of this miniature race.

The wonder the film reveals in the mundane is what makes The Secret World of Arrietty such a fantastic place to visit.

-- David Germain, The Associated Press