Hurrah for Studio Ghibli, basically.  Just saw this last night and it was utterly charming, very faithful (and the changes made were ones which lead to the movie being more cinematic than the book while still retaining the same essential tone and character).

I grew up reading The Borrowers, and so it was, basically, magical to see the depiction of how these tiny people lived and adapted to scavenging human detritus to build their home.  The nails as stepping-stones, the variety of tools, the chessman sculpture -- some of it wasn't from the book, though most was, but it displayed a very clear visual animation which brought me glee throughout.

There was a visual reference to the stereotypical image of korobokuru at one point which was cute to me, especially as a fan of Honey and Clover.  I wasn't sure how I felt about the cat's behavior toward the end.  Wasn't sure what I was supposed to make of that crow, either.  Kind of wished Pod had been bald; but other than that the characters were perfect adaptations of their book selves, I thought.

I kept squeeing at how well thought-out their depictions of hydrodynamics at that scale were.  Maybe it's weird to be excited by animations of surface tension in water.  I'm weird, okay?

Anyway, I liked it quite a bit, although I was interested to see that it had more of a single clear villain than most Miyazaki movies.

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