A cute little thing, without a big emotional finale but with a quiet, more ‘realistic’ ending. The spieces of the main character was well known to me already because I’ve seen two films about “the borrowers”, these little people that live beneath the house and come out from time to time to ‘borrow’ little things. I mean, they don’t give anything back, how could they, no, the point is that they only take what they need, they don’t go around looking for shiny things or taking stuff at random.
Here we have an isolated house in Japan. “The borrowers” living under it are three, mother father and a teenage girl, Arrietty. In the house there were only an old woman and an old maid, but now a teenage boy joins them. Sho is ill, has a heart condition and will have surgery soon. He is a poor lonely kid, sent to his aunt to wait for the operation. His parents have other things to do, I guess :-/ Poor Sho, it’s not surprising that he is so interested in the little figure of a Borrower he saw in the garden.
Arrietty is a lively, happy girl that loves her family and her life, and is very happy to be old enough to join her father on a borrowing-expedition :-p Mom needs a paper-handkerchief and possibly a sugar cube. She’s very excited; She puts the sugar-cube they find in her bag, then they move to another room and she sets about to help her father take out the paper towel when surprise-surprise, that’s Sho’s room and he’s awake, and he sees her presence and talks to her. She doesn’t reply and goes back home with dad, not taking the paper and also losing the sugar. She feels sorry for that complete failure, and also because now her parents start talking about moving out.
Sho’s aunt tells him of many years ago when her grandfather ( I think, not sure) saw the borrowers (although they never talked so he never knew they were borrowers) and had a dollhouse specifically built for them, but they were never seen again. We hear from Arrietty’s parents that three borrowers families used to live there once, until they were discovered by humans.
Sho leaves a sugar-cube with a little note where he saw her once, but she can’t take it because it’d be proof of their existence. Still, she sneaks out and goes outside his room (from the outside of course) and tells him to leave them alone, or they’ll have to move.
Her parents are too frightened now and are determined to move. Dad gets injured while looking for possible new homes ( I think, had he gone borrowing he’d have been in the house right? I think he went further out) and is helped back by Spiller, a borrower boy who tells them that there are other borrowers around, and other homes for them if they want.
Sho removes some of the floor-boards that covers their house and replaces their kitchen with the beautiful kitchen from the dollhouse, in a sweet attempt to better their life, be friendly, show good intention, but Arrietty’s mother freaks out instead. Worst thing is , the maid notices that the boards have been moved and finds their house and sees her mother and takes her prisoner!! She puts the poor little woman in a jar as if she was an insect or a thing. Arrietty goes to say goodbye to Sho outside and they talk and she lets him see her, and he tells her that she’s part of an endangered species, that they will become extinct someday but she replies passionately that they won’t, that they’ll fight on, and then he tells her about his condition, and that he doesn’t think he’ll survive, but then Arrietty hears her mother’s screams and she goes looking for her. Sho goes to his room all gloomy and the maid locks him inside. She wants to capture the other borrowers alive. Seeing her house empty, Arrietty goes to ask Sho’s help. They go out the window and back inside from another room’s window, and he tells her where to find her mom while he keeps the maid busy with food requests. The family prepares to leave, taking only what they can carry, and Sho destroys every trace of them so when the maid tries to show the old woman what she had seen, instead of a little house under the floor she sees only leaves and bricks and dirt. That same night they reach the river where Spiller is waiting for them to carry them away with him in a teapot. The house cat sees them and leads Sho to them, and Arrietty stops to say goodbye. Sho tells her that meeting her gave him the courage and the will to live he lacked before, and now he’ll fight to live. Arrietty gives him the clip she uses in her hair as something to remember her by, then she joins her family and Spiller and they go away, towards a new future.
It’s not the happy ending I thought it would be at first, when I imagined them living in the beautiful doll-house with Sho, but after all this can be an even happier ending, because Sho would have to leave that place sometime, and because they were alone before, not even knowing if there were other borrowers around, and now they’ll meet other people like them. Specially for Arrietty, so young a girl, this is probably the best thing.
ITA - Arrietty, il mondo segreto sotto il pavimento
ENG - the secret world of Arrietty
Kari-gurashi no Arietty
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