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Hey everyone, welcome to a movie review courtesy from Old School Lane. One of the many things that I love is anime, especially anime movies done by Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. I refer to Studio Ghibli as the Pixar of Japan; they both release wonderful movies that appeals to children and adults, they have memorable characters, interesting themes in their stories, creative premises in their plots, and have an amazing atmospheric feel. I wish that many other animated movie studios would take a page of their work. I'm looking at you, Illumination Entertainment. I was very excited when I first saw a trailer of The Secret World of Arrietty in a commercial about a month ago. It looked like a exact anime replica of the classic book The Borrowers written by Mary Norton.

The Secret World of Arrietty wasn't directed or produced by Miyazaki, only co-written. Does it make it fall short of a masterpiece or is it a wonderful rendition of the book with some creativity? 

Oh joyous day! As an animation nut as I am I love the Studio Ghibli films. From masterpieces like Castle in the Sky to films I found decent like Only Yesterday. I found that I’ve never been let down by Studio Ghibli. Unfortunately though I’ve never had the chance to see one of these great movies in theaters until now. The Secret of Arrietty was among the films I had to see this year alongside The Pirates and (I know I’ll get a lot of crap for saying this) The Lorax. But how did The Secret live up to my expectations.
As most of you have heard The Secret of Arrietty is based of Mary Norton’s The Borrowers series of books and that leads to the plot having to work fairly harder to distinguish itself from the dozens of Borrowers inspired books, TV shows, and movies and from where I stand it really doesn’t stray far from them but surprisingly it doesn't come off as derivative. Shaun a boy about to have a heart operation goes to his mother’s old summer home to find some rest and relaxation. It isn’t long before he finds and accidentally puts in danger the small new borrower Arrietty, a courageous girl, who is trying to cope with her new role of being a borrower. If I gave any more of a plot summary and I’d be spoiling the plot so I’ll leave it at that.

Hayao Miyazaki has made amazing cult hits such as Spirited Away, Castle in the Sky, Ponyo, Princess Mononoke, and the film that gave his studio a logo: My Neighbor Totoro. And after watching a Japanese trailer to his latest film “The Borrower Arrietty” which is based on an award-winning Novel called “The Borrowers”, I got excited to see it, but it took until this summer to have videos with English audio , and it made me more excited to see it next February http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeoKCQUDE-k ! But recently they changed the English voice cast for the U.S. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlMe7PavaRQ Personally, I'm disappointed with the voice cast, not that they are bad voices or anything, but the voices here sounded nothing like the voices in those other videos. My point is, if they already got English voices from another country (England comes to mind), then why dub the movie in English AGAIN??? If you just voice in English in the UK first, then that's fine since we get to understand what they are saying, but if you change the voices because you are posting it to America AFTER England, then it's just pointless!