A culture of borrowing: Iconography, ideology and idiom in Kari-gurashi no Arietti/The Secret World of Arrietty

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. The film as text occupies a liminal space, straddling the expanse between the author Mary Norton’s ideological context of late imperialism, and that of present day Japan in an era of what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000), in their work Empire, refer to as an era of post-Fordian globalization: an era characterized by global awareness and cultural sensitivity. This article examines the Studio Ghibli animated film adaptation of Mary Norton’s The Borrowers as a liminal text, uneasily straddling the boundaries between the ideologies inherent in the context of its twenty-first-century production and at the same time, inevitably pervaded by the cultural context of its nineteenth- and twentieth-century antecedents.