Review of The Secret World of Arrietty

Arrietty the Borrower, known as The Secret World of Arrietty in North America, is a movie based on a book titled The Borrowers. In this world, borrowers are miniature sized people who make a living by secretly taking small amounts of food and other household items from regular human beings. By small amounts, they have to take things minimally so the regular humans don't notice. That also means that when they are collecting things they need to survive, they have to remain undetected. The story begins with a young boy named Sho staying at his mother's home during the summer being under the care of hisaunt Sadako and the housemaid Haru. There, he spots the borrower Arrietty and immediately developes the urge to protect her. On the first night, while Arrietty and her father are on a mission to collect a tissue and a sugar cube, she and Sho make eye contact with each other. Sho tries to assure them he holds no ill will to them, but the family of borrowers are skeptical and consider moving out. Sho tries anything helpful to convince them to stay, but he ends up repulsing them even more. As the story progresses, Haru occassionally asks Sho if he has seen any little people around only for the latter to completely deny it. Haru is obviously the main antagonist of this movie, and I really find her motivation to be intriguing. She wants to capture any and all borrowers that are settling underneath the house as she perceives them to be thieves.

I had a lot of fun watching this movie. The relationship between Arrietty and Sho is the greatest highlight of it, especially during the climax. The voice acting was spot on, and the music is good. My favorite scene is when Arrietty makes a decision between a green uniform and a red dress to wear for her first borrowing mission. Obviously, you got to pick the proper outfit when you're going out to find stuff for your survival, and that proper outfit... is the beautiful red dress. Arrietty has to look her best, am I right? I will say I am disturbed by the fact that she finds and keeps a pin like a sword by having it poke through her dress, and whenever she pulls it out, it doesn't leave any visible holes on her outfit. Like, when you poke a hole in clothing, that hole is going to stay and the more you keep poking it, the bigger it's going to get and no way can that pin can stay in that same area of Arrietty's dress every time. I'm sure I'm going to get a response saying "It's fiction! Who cares?"

I definitely recommend this movie. In all honesty, I wouldn't have known about this movie if the American English Dub wasn't advertised on Disney Channel. I was super excited when I heard that Sho and Arrietty were voiced by David Henrie and Bridget Mendler, so I actually went out of my way to buy a copy of the movie. Well... I guess my past self wasn't being specific when ordering it because I ended up getting the British English version. I realized it the moment I listened to the voice acting. Oh well, that was before watching anime became an official hobby. This review is mainly based on the original Japanese version, which I took the time to watch before typing this. Besides, Disney decided to rename Sho to Shawn. I can understand why they did that, but that just makes the original Japanese version the more authentic experience in my opinion.