English-Language Arrietty Trailer Online

Studio Ghibli brings us Borrowers

English-Language Arrietty Trailer Online

by Owen Williams |
Published on

There've been a couple of previous teaser clips for Studio Ghibli's gorgeous looking animation, but this English-dubbed trailer for Arrietty is actually our closest look at the movie yet.

Based, like Howl's Moving Castle, on a British source novel (that one was by Diana Wynne Jones), Arrietty is, of course, adapted from Mary Norton's The Borrowers, familiar from everyone's school library, and from a 1990s BBC series starring Rebecca Callard as Arrietty and Ian Holm as her father Pod. There was also a movie in 1997.

It's about, more or less, as the trailer rhymingly puts it, "a world beneath our own, where little people have made their home". The Borrowers are a family of Liliputian-like tinies who get by on stuff they've liberated from the full-sized world of the "human beans". But Arrietty's friendship with one of those giants, in the form of a boy newly arrived in the household above the Borrower burrow, is bound to cause problems...

Arrietty updates the locations and names to modern-day Tokyo, although the setting isn't exactly emphasised. And unusually, there are two English-language dubs being exported from Japan: US audiences will get the vocal stylings of the likes of Amy Poehler and Will Arnett, while here in the UK the voice cast is headed by Saoirse Ronan, with support from Mark Strong, Tom Holland, Olivia Coleman, Phyllida Law and Geraldine McEwan.*

Hiromasa Yonebayashi makes his directing debut following his work as an animator on Ponyo, Howl's and **Spirited Away **(although Miyazaki himself wrote the script and "planned" the film), and the UK release date is July 29.

*Although some cinemas will give you the option of seeing it in Japanese with subtitles.

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