Review of The Secret World of Arrietty

The plot is an adaptation of the first book, The Borrowers by Mary Norton, in a 5 book series. If one wanted to see where the plot goes from where they leave at the end you could read the series to find out. Since the movie screenplay is by Miyazaki I would expect a lot of differences with the book being much more unfocused, boring, and lacking in thematic depth (the differences in the synopsis suggest as much). The art/animation quality is top-notch and the movie has a decent amount of effort to give life to the world of the little people with plenty of charmand attention to detail with fun things like water physics at small scales and repurposing human items into their own scavenger culture and such. However, the mundane Earth setting does lack a certain charm in the absence of fantastical originality.
The plot is juvenile and severely lacking in substance as very little actually happens.
The antagonist lady is cartoonishly evil for no real reason, I shudder to think what she would do to someone suffering from dwarfism.
The mother's character is pretty much to be an annoying victim... which is annoying. The father is a generic stoic rock, which is serviceable but uninteresting.
Arrietty and the boy (but really all the characters) lack much of any character motivations. It's mostly just a SoL adventure where they're all just going about their day living life.
Arrietty barely (needlessly) uses the pin-sword she 'borrows' despite the amount of importance they pointlessly put on it. She even uses a little spatula tool more, fighting off a bug before finding the pin.
The whole borrowing vs stealing theme they're going for always catches me as very silly: 'We're the Borrowers. We don't steal, we just borrow!' (without ever giving back).
There are a few logical inconsistencies: there's a handlebar access hatch in the closet floor directly opening to the house of the borrowers that apparently no one in the entire current family let alone the housemaid noticed until we cut to the boy immediately having already found their location with it. (This access hatch implies that an older generation of house owners set up the borrower's house for them before both later generations forgot/stopped trusting each other). They play very fast and loose with how audible some sounds would be and how much mass/strength would be needed to perform certain actions they do.
The ending is quite lacking as well since there was very little to wrap up in the first place.

The only notable differences between the (Disney American) English dub and sub:
Aside from some added little bits of dialogue and overall improvements to lines, the English dub censors a little political environmentalist speech the boy gives about how there are 7 billion humans on the planet and barely any traces of the little people and all the species he's read about that have died out, so they'll likely die out just as many other species have as mortality is the fate of all life which she wants to struggle to change which then ties into his own mortality fears. They censor it by replacing it with a repetitive 'fate is fate but maybe if we do something to change fate we can change fate and survive' dialogue to tie into his mortality fears.
The English dub also closes the open ending of the sub by adding in a little epilogue narration aside by the boy: "I never saw her again. But the following summer I returned, and was happy to hear the people in the house down the road talking about how many things in their home had gone... missing." Confirming that the boy lived through his surgery and similarly for Arrietty's family being fine.
The English dub also adds a hilariously generic modern summer romance pop song to end the movie added after the English version of the original song made for this movie.
There's also a UK (non-Disney) English dub, but it is overall woefully cold and lacking in many of the additional charming little lines added in by the Disney dub. Nonetheless both do some lines better than the other.

7/10 (where 5/10 is average)