Review of The Secret World of Arrietty
It's hard coming to terms with the gradual disillusionment with Studio Ghibli. Save for a handful of classics, once you look past some initially pretty visuals, you'll see the empty, wasted potential of a film. And unfortunately, this one is one of those duds. The greatest fumble here is the narrative. It's an unfocused, shallow hackjob of cobbled together plots and plot seedlings that never develop or go anywhere, or if they do, amount to nothing. The film sows seeds near the beginning of numerous lines for the movie to follow. Sho's illness, his being pawned off on his aunt for convalescence while his mother goesto another country, with a mentioned-in-one-line divorce on top of this. The possibility of all these other Borrower families, their disappearance or perhaps even extinction, or Arrietty's blossoming into adulthood, independence, and self-sufficiency. The historic relationships of the Borrowers and Sho's family that's hinted at numerous times throughout the film. Haru's interest in the little people. The film raises all these possible issues, and fleshes out absolutely none of them. Instead, it foregoes these to be a run-of-the-mill Smurf's episode where Gargamel (Haru) is cooking up a silly scheme only for it to blow up in his (her) face. It's just so mind-boggling how they could set up all these possible plot threads and instead go for a stupid, Saturday morning cartoon plot, of a filler episode nonetheless. It makes you wonder, was it the budget, was it time constraints? Or perhaps, and more likely, the writers and directors are just idiots.
On another note, the animation and visuals here are another letdown. No, I don't mean the movement of the characters. In fact, as far as a scaled down animated film, this is one of the best. I especially appreciate how well everything is kept in scale. But what I'm harping on here is the facial expressions. Sho is so blank-faced and unexpressive throughout the entire film. Like a goldfish staring at you through the bowl, he doesn't let any emotion past his utterly bland face. To it's credit, Arrietty, her mom, and Haru have basic expressions that convey simple emotions well enough. But forget about any complex emotions or expression from any characyer, especially Sho, his aunt, Arrietty's Dad, and the wild Borrower.
The Engrish vocal tracks are also extremely off-putting. Not just in their lyrical failings, but their utilization in this film. They come in strong and swell even more. It's unnecessarily loud to the point where I was trying to focus on my tinnitus instead. In the middle of the film, the background music is fine, but specifically at the start and end of the movie, the implementation and selection of the music is just horrid.
A lilliputian adventure in a normal-sized world is a perfect fantasy setting that should be pretty hard to fuck up. But that's precisely what happens here. Peel back the charm and you get a disappointingly shallow narrative with cut corners and astoundingly poor directorial decisions rearing their head. Seems like this is par for the course for 90% of Ghibli films.