Arrietty

Wu, Sijia (2023). Small is beautiful: Japanese aesthetic consciousness in the animated adaptation of The Borrowers. Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies, 37(3), 32-44.

 "British writer Mary Norton’s well-known novel The Borrowers was successfully adapted into the Japanese animated film Arrietty the Borrower (Karigurashi no Arrietty), rewritten by Hayao Miyazaki and directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi. This paper aims to explore the phenomenon of cross-cultural adaptation in which a British novel is made to represent Japanese aesthetic values. The article argues that the animated film is deeply influenced by the concept and practice of miniaturisation, as well as the aesthetic characteristics of 'small is beautiful,' which is part of Japanese national identity. The author of the paper tries to describe how this aesthetic consciousness is reflected in the animated film in the following three aspects: the miniaturised ecological environment, the miniaturised life scenes, and the miniaturised narrative space."

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Butler, Catherine (2019). Arrietty comes home: Studio Ghibli’s The Borrower Arrietty and Its English-language dubs. Annals of the Institute for Comparative Studies of Culture, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, 80, 57-71. 

Hyland, Robert (2015) A culture of borrowing: Iconography, ideology and idiom in Kari-gurashi no Arietti/The Secret World of Arrietty. East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, 1(2), 205-222.

"Japanese director and producer of animated film, Miyazaki Hayao had long wanted to make an adaptation of the Mary Norton novel, The Borrowers (1952). The film Kari-gurashi no Arietti/The Secret World of Arrietty (Yonebayashi, 2010) at first look strikes one as a suitable fit for Studio Ghibli both culturally and ideologically, with its history of setting stories in imagined European landscapes and its established style of blending fantastic and realist narrative with imagistic elements, and indeed, Japan is itself not without legends of miniature people or Chibi Kobito. The film, however, manifests myriad ambivalences, many of which are derived from the limitations and contradictions inherent in adapting a geographically, historically and culturally ‘foreign’ text. Using Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) and their writings on globalization in their work Empire, this paper uses their concept of post-Fordian globalization: an era characterized by global awareness and cultural sensitivity, as a framework from which to analyse the film’s many ambivalences. This article examines cultural, aesthetic and ideological liminality inherent in the Studio Ghibli animated film adaptation of Mary Norton’s The Borrowers, a film which reflects its twenty-first-century production and at the same time, inevitably is pervaded by the cultural context of its nineteenth and twentieth-century antecedents"

Jackson, Paul (2012). The borrowers abroad: 'Arrietty'. Metro Magazine: Media & Education Magazine, 172, 60-63.

"Studio Ghibli's adaptation of 'The Borrowers' relocates the story to contemporary Tokyo, but Hiromasa Yonebayashi's film remains surprisingly faithful to Mary Norton's very English tale."

Lightburn, Jane A. (2012). Adapting Arrietty: Hayao Miyazaki's re-telling of Mary Norton's "The Borrowers". Foreign Languages & Literature, 37(1), 97-114.