You Had Me at “Studio Ghibli Does The Borrowers”

How did I not know about this? Studio Ghibli’s latest release (this summer, in Japan) was The Borrowers?

Official title: Karigurashi no Arrietty (The Borrower Arrietty)

I see (via the SDSU Children’s Literature blog) that Miyazaki wrote the screenplay but did not direct the film. Still, my hopes are high.

The post links to an interesting article at the Daily Yomiuri about the slight differences between Arrietty’s father in the book and the film:

…while Pod is not particularly loquacious in the novel, neither is he reserved. In a scene after Pod has discovered that Arrietty has spoken to “the boy,” Pod speaks quite a bit.

When Arrietty defends herself, saying the boy has agreed to deliver a letter she has written to Borrowers living elsewhere, he appears to take some grim satisfaction in his scornfully elaborate explication of the uselessness of Arrietty’s act: “…do you see your mother walking across two fields and a garden…two fields full of crows and cows and horses and what-not, to take a cup of tea with your Aunt Lupy, whom she never much liked anyway?” There is a lavishness in Pod’s amplification that can only be achieved through the protracted use of language. Not for him, the effect of understated brevity. Ghibli’s Pod, on the other hand, barely speaks unless strictly necessary—and even then he sometimes remains reticent in situations when a tad more back and forth might be deemed obligatory. His lack of words might seem unduly taciturn in a Western context, but, as in the original, he is portrayed as a sympathetic character. Just not a very talkative one.