RE:Animetion – The Secret World of Arrietty

Studio Ghibli's beautiful adaptation of The Borrowers

We’ll start with this: the 1997 live-action movie never happened. Do you hear me?

It. Did. Not. Happen.

Renaming the classic children’s novel after the brand damage from that travesty was a sad but necessary act of damage control.

The Japanese title was Karigurashi no Arrietty (借りぐらしのアリエッティ). Karigurashi no translates roughly as either “The living by borrowing of” or “The Borrowed life of”.  There’s a lyrical quality to it. From that perspective, The Secret World of Arrietty works well enough as a translation. 

And that pretty much sums up the entire movie.

It was translated from a story about life in countryside England to one about life in countryside Japan. The original novel was far more class-conscious, though this may be more a matter of cultural perspective. Mary Norton was a product of the English mid-middle class—a fundamentally insecure station. You might climb higher, but it was just as easy to lower lower, and once you fell, you’d be scrabbling just to stay middle-class at all. Hayao Miyazaki’s family, by contrast, belonged to the lower upper class. It’s easier to feel secure when your place in society has been encoded by law and tradition for centuries.

Rural life in Britain had been under siege from the Left since the Attlee government. In Japan, it wasn’t ideology but economics that chipped away at it. The Japanese don’t reject rural life—they yearn to preserve it—but the island’s limited resources make that difficult.

Both versions of The Borrowers make for an intriguing comparison in contrasts. Norton’s prose conveys the kindly, cluttered warmth of an English country house. There’s a little too much of everything, because everything has been piling up for a couple of hundred years. It’s easy to imagine things slipping through the cracks—perhaps into the hands of little people borrowing from the big folk.

The Japanese setting, by contrast, places the Borrowers in a Taishō-era middle class country house: an early 20th-century blend of Western and Japanese architecture, where the aesthetic of minimalism reigns. A house that welcomes shadows, and respects the things that dwell within them.

This applies to the Borrowers themselves. In the book, “borrowing” is essentially stealing—but it’s justified by the need to survive. The class lines are much sharper, and Norton, being politically to the left, leans into that. In the film, the borrowing is still survival, but it is framed as a natural act—something that belongs in the natural order of things. There’s a sense of harmony to it.

When Pod takes Arrietty to see the dollhouse, it’s not just a moment of wonder—it’s an object lesson. Arrietty loves the beauty and scale of the furniture, that would be perfect for Borrowers but her father cautions her: “These things are for dolls. We are not dolls.” There are some things it is not their place to borrow. There’s a humility, a quiet discipline, to their way of life. A natural gentleness.

This sense of harmony is where the film outshines the book. Studio Ghibli brings Arrietty’s world to life in a way words can’t—because they Ghibli sweats the details, and they make them gorgeous. When Arrietty’s mother pours tea, it falls in a single drop. That’s how viscosity behaves at that scale. Pins become swords. Teacups become bathtubs. Nails are a ladder. A sugar cube is a boulder.

And the world itself feels dangerous. The film emphasizes the scale of the Borrowers not just visually, but thematically. Rain, leaves, a stiff wind—each is a mortal hazard. It would be so easy to crush one of them without ever knowing it. Ghibli’s art doesn’t just render the Borrowers’ world—it makes it tangible. And that’s something live-action never could do. (And certainly didn’t.) Unlike Spirited Away, this isn’t a fantasy realm; it has to feel real.

Arrietty herself differs as well. In the novel, she’s more rebellious and senselessly naive, which drives her relationship with the human boy. In the film, those traits are present, but tempered by a thoughtfulness and emotional depth that make her feel more human—ironically, by making her more Borrower.

Miyazaki’s interest likely piqued when he heard the line: “Sent to the country for his health.” His own mother spent much of his youth in a sanatorium for tuberculosis. That fear of her dying was the unspoken background music of his childhood. In Arrietty, it becomes a quiet duet of frailty—between two children who can never truly be together.

They are each other’s unspoken first love. A love made painful

because it is impossible. The gulf between them is so wide they cannot even touch hands. And that makes their final parting even more melancholy. A leaf’s place is to be green in the seasons of life—and to brown and fall in the seasons of death. They both understand, even at the start, that what they feel for each other is more poignant than anything else—because it can never be anything more.

One of the biggest changes from book to film lies in the supporting characters—especially the housekeeper. In the book, Mrs. Driver is a classic example of the “butler” trope: a member of the servant class who mingles with the upper class, yet still enforces the line between them. She couldn’t use the front door, but she was the one who answered it—and decided who was sent around to the servant’s entrance. She enforced the border between the classes.

This role didn’t translate to Japanese culture, so she became Haru: a sly, almost clownish antagonist, more of an obstacle than a villain. The only meaningful kanji interpretation of “Haru” might be applied to her name a character that means “sealed,” but most likely, the name was just chosen for localization.

Spiller, introduced earlier in the film than he is in the books, serves a specific function: he is Arrietty’s transitional figure. There’s a hint of romance, though nothing explicit. He’s not necessarily the one she will end up with—but unlike the human boy Sho, he’s someone she could end up with.

Because Sho and the Borrowers are both facing extinction.

Sho expects to die, no matter what the surgery does. Arrietty and her family may be the last of their kind. She could be facing a very lonely old age.

That, ultimately, is what makes The Secret World of Arrietty feel like a true Miyazaki film—even though he only wrote the screenplay. It’s suffused with one of his great recurring themes: the slow fading away of things. People. Childhood. Forests. Streams. Rural Japan. It doesn’t really translate the novel at all but it does a surprisingly good job of transposing it. 

The Secret World of Arrietty doesn’t seek to replace Mary Norton’s novel so much as reframe it through a different lens. The political tension of class is softened into a more organic meditation on scale, place, and fragility. The story remains rooted in the idea of being small in a world that doesn’t notice you—but the Japanese telling is more forgiving of that smallness. It turns vulnerability into beauty.

This film is not the definitive version of The Borrowers, and it was never trying to be. It’s an interpretation—a conversation across cultures and decades. It takes a uniquely English story and translates it into the quiet lyricism of Japanese animation, preserving the heart even as it changes the face.

And that, in the end, is the art of adaptation.

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