Arrietty
Short description
Arrietty is a fourteen-year-old girl who lives hidden beneath the floorboards of an old house with her parents. The family belongs to a race of tiny people who survive by borrowing small quantities of everyday items from the human residents above, careful never to be seen. That secrecy is their protection: if humans notice them, the family must move. Their routine is disrupted when a twelve-year-old boy named Sho, staying at the house to rest before a serious operation, catches sight of Arrietty. A quiet friendship forms between them even as her parents prepare to leave and other dangers close in.
The film is Hiromasa Yonebayashi's directorial debut, the first of four features he has directed, and it was written by Hayao Miyazaki and Keiko Niwa with Toshio Suzuki producing. It was made at Studio Ghibli with a budget of 23 million dollars and released in 2010; it went on to earn about 150 million dollars worldwide, several times its cost. Mirai Shida voices Arrietty, with Ryunosuke Kamiki as Sho and supporting performances from Tomokazu Miura, Keiko Takeshita, Kirin Kiki and Shinobu Otake.
Its ratings sit closely together: 7.6 out of 10 on IMDb from around 116,000 votes, 7.7 out of 10 on TMDB from a few thousand votes, and a film critics' rating of 7.7 out of 10 from 150 reviews. The narrow spread suggests a film that critics and audiences have received in much the same way.
What's left behind the scenes
- The cartoon is based on Mary Norton's novel "The Borrowers".
- The founders of Studio Ghibli, Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, had been considering the possibility of adapting Mary Norton's novella for 40 years.
- Mary Norton's novella was awarded the Carnegie Medal, the UK's most prestigious annual award for children's literature. In 2007, the awarding British union of information and library workers named it among the ten most valuable works of children's literature of the last 70 years.
- The book is set in Britain in the 1940s and 50s. In the animated film, the setting has been moved to modern-day Japan. Its heroes live in Koganei, the same place where the Studio Ghibli office is located.
- The working title of the animated film was “Chiisana Arrietty” (“Little Arrietty”).
- Hayao Miyazaki decided to launch the project in 2008. He believed that the film's plot would resonate well with the global economic crisis that had engulfed the world at the time.
- For the first time in the history of Studio Ghibli, a non-Japanese composer was entrusted with writing the music for its film. French singer and harpist Cécile Corbel, a great admirer of Hayao Miyazaki's animated films, sent her second album, released at the time, to the studio in 2009. Producer Toshio Suzuki was very impressed.
- The directorial position was entrusted to one of the studio's leading animators, Hiromasa Yonebayashi, who became the youngest director in the history of Studio Ghibli.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
