On DVD: "Arrietty"

Arrietty, a freehand adaptation of The Borrowers scripted by Hayao Miyazaki and directed by Yonebayashi Hiromasa, takes Mary Norton's people under the stairs as the basis for a summer holiday coming-of-age tale, and a parable of peaceful co-existence. The Borrowers in question become the latest examples of Studio Ghibli sprites, headed up by inquisitive 13-year-old Arrietty: on one of the latter's expeditions out into the world of "human beans", she catches the normal-sized eye of Sho, a sickly young boy who lives in the house proper with his grandma and their housekeeper. After some initial awkwardness, the kids are all right around one another - it's their elders, inevitably, who have all the issues.

In both its form and content, Arrietty seeks out the harmonious, finding neat visual parallels between its well-dressed interiors and its lush, leafy exteriors. Ghibli have delighted before in the impact of raindrops upon leaves, but here we also get to admire the craft that's gone into crafting Sho's doll house ("it was made by a real furniture maker") or that exhibited by Arrietty's parents in weaving baskets and baking bread. The Studio's films are now as likely to be overrated as anybody's, and something about the storytelling here didn't quite take for me, just as it didn't quite in the previous Ponyo: the characterisation there was the compensation, so it's a pity Yonebayashi felt compelled to draw Arrietty's mother and Sho's housekeeper as grimacing grotesques.

With its familiar-feeling source material, 2D animation and wide-eyed heroine, Arrietty feels like the most Disneyish Ghibli for some time, in ways both bad and good: certainly the lilting, unhurried mood is very different, and the pay-offs, when they come, are far less obvious. The eye for detail remains, as ever, as sharp as the animators' pencils, and always attuned to the needs of the narrative: from the care lavished upon this world's bugs and buttons, and the last-reel attempt to give even a copper kettle some semblance of a personality, it's very clearly - and aptly - the little things that count here.

Arrietty is available on DVD and via some pay-per-view services from Monday.