But these events play out softly as a sweet coming-of-age ritual. On paper, the sequence might play like a thrilling heist movie, with Arrietty fighting off an immense, aggressive cockroach, ziplining up a narrow vertical space, and rappelling off a cabinet to the ground far below. At 13, she’s permitted to accompany her taciturn father Pod into that house for the first time, on a quiet raid to get some supplies: a single sugar cube and a single tissue. Arrietty is a Borrower, a doll-sized girl whose equally teeny family lives inside the walls of a human family’s vast country house.
It’s a hushed, drawn-out experience where the biggest action is a character stopping to gape.
The most memorable moment in Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s Secret World of Arrietty, based on Mary Norton’s Borrower books, isn’t dynamic or explosive.
