Seeing any film by the Ghibli Animation Studio on film, on a big screen is always a treat, Ponyo last year at the festival was a highlight and the same was true for Arriety today, here’s the trailer:
The film is inspired by The Borrowers, a book I read as a child all those years ago and this take on the story was simply beautiful and enchanting while also resonating with themes far larger in scope than a simple childrens tale. The premise is based on a parallel race of people who are tiny in scale, insect size even. And I have to say the film has an excellent soundtrack, the score by Cécile Corbel is equals parts enchanting and full of adventure without ever letting the drama and inherent danger of tiny people living in a giants world become overwhelming, and it so easily could have. There were more than a few moments where an inappropriately over the top music cue would have resulted in a theatre full of crying children – the restraint & direction of the score was greatly appreciated, but it is the sound that I’d like to comment on in more detail, because it was simply masterful!
Even knowing the premise of this film would make any sound designer get excited – point of view and scale being two fundamentally interesting and important techniques to use in the creation of a soundtrack. But when your core cast are only two inches high, and spend part of their time in a full size human world, you just know there are going to be a lot of opportunities to accentuate drama & story telling via sound. Early in the film we are introduced to this concept almost innocently, where the tiny heroine of the story is almost seen by a real size boy but is then chased by a mischievous cat (aren’t all Ghibli cats so anthropomorphically great?) into the basement of the house & the impacts and movements of the cat are thunderous without being scary – Arrietty almost laughs them off, but as an audience we are introduced to the scalable sound world of the film.
When Arrietty gets to go with her Dad on her first ‘borrowing’ mission, we really get to experience the human world from a tiny point of view. The sound effects when she discovers a discarded pin are just perfect, cueing our understanding of the scaled weight by accentuating with just the right elements. Similarly the ambiences are beautifully conceived and mixed to accentuate the danger we would feel from a human perspective were we running around such potentially treacherous environments. But going back to the music for a second, there is a beautifully conceived reveal where Arrietty suddenly realises she is in the presence of a human boy. For a moment the entire audience gasped at the potential danger, which was revealed in a subtle and yet more powerful way than any dumb horror film sting could ever convey. But that single moment spoke to me of great maturity in both the sound design and composition but even more so the direction.
The last film I would have seen which also played with scale as a core part of its approach to sound design would be Ratatouille where we were repeatedly plunged into a rats point of view of the world. Randy Thom and teams work for it was also masterful, but its interesting to compare the two films because despite the motivation for sound being similar, the results were vastly different with Arrietty feeling more poetic & emotional compared with Ratatoille’s overtly action based sound cueing. But that is also a direct reflection on the style of animation – while both Pixar and Ghibli are producers of animated films, culturally, aesthetically and their means of story telling are worlds apart. But to continue exploration of the idea, what other films play with scale in a similar way to these? There are of course many insect films, animated and real (Bugs Life, Microcomos) but they tend to stay within their primary scale whereas I really mean films that accentuate a duality of scale…
IMDB only lists a few members of the sound team – I’d love to know where the film was mixed and who were the recording mixers; if any Japanese sound editors or people involved in the film happen to read this could you please comment? Regardless I’d like to personally congratulate the great work achieved in this films soundtrack, and highly recommend the film for kids, big and small….
Koji Kasamatsu – sound designer
Eriko Kimura – foley recordist
Oh one other funny thing, all through the film the subtitles kept referring to a ‘human bean’ – I think they might have meant human being 
