maharetr

This was a darling little movie. Visually gorgeous, and the soundtrack was charming. Arrietty is a fantastic little (heh) heroine, a 10cm little person who lives under the floor with her parents, who 'borrow' things from upstairs to make their homes. I grew up on the early 90s Ian Holmes version, and on the original book, so it had some pretty big childhood shoes to fill, and it did it well. It kept the spirit of the original, and spun it out in Ghibi ways that pleased me.

I have nit-picks: many of the things in their home were Borrower-sized, rather than visibly appropriated or cut down to size. I was totally charmed by the use of stamps as paintings, though! The gender roles were almost painfully stereotypical, and I feel like with a tiny moment or two you could have established Arrietty's mother's fretting as, say, a completely legitimate response to a really hard and stressful life. Also, subtitliers! Please call SBS and ge them to explain how it's done Properly. :P But these are comparatively tiny things.

I was delighted by the details everywhere, and how fearless and curious Arrietty was. I was struck by having a female protagonist, an actual point-of-view character, and how many of Ghibi's films do this, and how Pixar is only just getting around to it. I was also struck by the fact that there was actually two early-20s guys sitting behind us, and they seemed to enjoy it as much as I did. It's the little things!

Also, my new 'if I won lotto' dream is to pay Valve to make a Portal-2-quality-graphics Borrowers game. Seriously! A tiny little third-person-character, creeping around a giant-sized house, looking for things to complete their home and combining 'borrowed' items to make X, which would get you into room Y, which would enable you to... etc *cough*

In sum: Arrietty was wonderful. I recommend it :)

Made of awesome.

Thanks to black_samvara I've now seen all four Alien movies (or at least enough of the third to count), and I'm kinda in love with Resurrection. ( Random bits under here )

Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman continue to be very pretty and Brandon Walters has amazing eyelashes. I know this deliberately wasn't the most realistic of movies, but I cannot remember rolling my eyes that many times during a movie, ever.