What the studio does, brilliantly, is preserve a hand-drawn look and feel in its work, as in the exteriors in “The Secret World,” where the characters pop against a painterly meadow. Ghibli still uses hand drawings, along with computer-generated imagery, though it shuns 3-D animation, the near-ubiquitous process in which models of characters are scanned three-dimensionally or created directly in a computer. The world outside, unsurprisingly for Ghibli, is lush and inviting, by turns a dense jungle and an impressionistic landscape washed in gradations of green and flecked with red, yellow and purple. Yonebayashi fills in this hidden realm with fanciful dollhouse detail, both in the Clock quarters - where a clay flower pot serves as the hearth, and postage stamps hang like paintings - and in the shadowy interiors where Arrietty, nimbly scaling steps made of nails, first learns the art of the steal from her father, Pod (Will Arnett). The Clocks live under the floors of the human cottage, yet the home they’ve cobbled together from borrowed bits and purloined pieces is as cozy as the one upstairs.Ī Ghibli animator turned director, Mr. Part of the charm of the Borrowers books, a quality shared by the movie, is the theme of the tiny making wonderfully do in a world inhabited by, and made for, the big (like parents). An ungenerous soul might brand the Borrowers thieves the French filmmaker Agnès Varda would describe them as gleaners, those who live lightly on the land, taking what others don’t need, won’t miss and discard. “The Secret World of Arrietty,” as fans of “The Borrowers” will have sussed out, is based on the first of five books Mary Norton wrote about tiny people who primarily live off what they appropriate from human beings (or “beans,” as they call them). The cat belongs to the storybook cottage where her family lives and where a sick human boy, Shawn (David Henrie), has just moved in. That kind of screen equality is rare in American animation (this year Pixar releases its first movie with a female lead), but it’s never been an issue at Ghibli, where girls have long reigned, without the usual frou-frou, in films like “Spirited Away” and “Ponyo.” In keeping with that tradition, a tiara and pink tulle don’t make Arrietty special: her size and especially her bravery do, as evident when, early on, she sprints across a yard with a few leaves and a sprig of flowers while being chased by a cat that looks like a furry blowfish. Even so, while she’s 14 going on 15, and three or so inches going on four, Arrietty seems bigger because her courage, along with her fluid form and softly dappled world, come by way of the famed Japanese company Studio Ghibli, where little girls rule, if not necessarily as princesses. For all that Arrietty Clock (voiced by Bridgit Mendler) knows, her family may be the last of its kind, a lost little world in a land of giants. The wee folk beneath the floorboards in the wistful animated children’s film “The Secret World of Arrietty” don’t get underfoot: they scramble and hide, if less like scattering mice and more like practiced explorers.
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