Arietty

At the end of 2009, Studio Ghibli promoted one of its chief animators, Hiromasa Yonebayashi, into the director's chair for The Secret World of Arietty. Based on Mary Norton's classic (1952) English children's novel The Borrowers, the tale of the endangered species of tiny household spirits had already inspired many English-language film versions (most recently another BBC production, starring Stephen Fry, Christopher Eccleston and Victoria Wood).

Ghibli and its co-founder Hayao Miyazaki won the animation Oscar in 2002 for Spirited Away (the first foreign-language film to do so) and may hope to do the same when Disney distributes the latest film in North America in February 2012. It won't.

It suffers from the disadvantages of Miyazaki's dominant themes. When a story doesn't have enough action, interesting characters and pacing, the studio's customary motifs of ecological awareness, feminism, anti-capitalism, humanity and pacifism are pretty tedious.

The Borrrowers was a gentle, genteel saga, a pining for older days and ways, and it lent itself ideally to Miyazaki's ethos. The only child of a house's last couple of surviving Borrowers, 14-year-old Arietty, is introduced by her father to the frightening world of the huge humans, from which small essential supplies must be "borrowed". In scenes of miniaturisation akin to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Arietty is spied by the sickly boy of the house, who befriends her and helps her family escape from the clutches of a grumpy housekeeper.

The hand-drawn imagery of ivy, raindrops, hidden passageways and spring flowers is brilliantly imagined, manoeuvred and coloured. Such work is a world away from the traditions of Disney or Pixar, and the Japanese conventions of adorable big-eyed children, animals with conflicted characters and boo-able grouchy old ladies are maintained handsomely. There just aren't enough dramatic developments or side-attractions to grab a non-Japanese viewer's attention. The specially-commissioned music (by Cecile Corbel, the French-Bretonne singer and harpist whose sound resembles that of New Agers such as Ireland's Enya) has a similar languor.

[The DVD version watched had an unfortunate typo in otherwise excellent subtitles: the Borrowers' neighbours are called "human beans".]