The most touching love story and best children's movie in a long time, Hiromasa Yonebayashi's adaptation of Mary Norton's book The Borrowers employs old-fashioned animation techniques to create a world that is familiar, uncanny, and luminous. Shawn (David Henrie), a sickly youth, arrives at his aunt's country house to convalesce before undergoing an operation. There he hears a rustle in a bush, which turns out to be Arrietty (Bridgit Mendler), a tiny "Borrower" his own age who lives with her parents (Amy Poehler and Will Arnett) under the floor in a cozy home furnished with detritus salvaged from the bigger household. As Shawn exclaims when he finally sees her face to face, Arrietty is beautiful, but his affection proves almost as destructive as that of another victim of wrong-scale love, King Kong. Combining lush color with minute detail, Arrietty transforms the mundane into magic.
