First Timer
Quote of the day: ”"From the moment I saw you, I wanted to protect you”
This was a good little film. Gonna give it a 7/10, but it’s bordering on an 8. Let’s start with the good. The world that they built here was really cool. The sense of scale was done really well, and the creativity of how the borrowers used the items available to them to get around, was leaving me wanting to know more about them and their people. The music was fantastic as usual, and the sound design was great. The way sound was magnified when we were following the borrowers was very immersive and added to that sense of scale well. Finally, Arietty was just fantastic. What a little cutie.
Now what brings it down to a 7. Story was the biggest culprit here. It just lacked flow, felt disjointed, and then didn’t make a ton of sense. Haru’s motivations for wanted to capture the borrowers is super flimsy (I mean, they stole sugar, and tissues, and soap, who cares…) and Sho’s drama is never fully wrapped up. I may be being a bit nitpick, but those points made the films endgame feel rushed and unsatisfying. Also, Arietty may have been great, but the rest of the characters had very little fleshing out and felt slightly flat to me. Regardless, still a fun film with that great Ghibli animation you can usually expect.