The Row House Cinema will show the 2010 Studio Ghibli film The Secret World of Arrietty (借りぐらしのアリエッティ) from July 1 through July 7 as part of its Fantastical Adventures series.
A 2010 Washington Post review writes:
"Arrietty," based on Mary Norton's children's book series "The Borrowers," is the story of tiny people who live under floorboards and swipe what they need from the Beans (what they call humans) upstairs. A piece of delicious art, much like the other films from legendary filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki ("Spirited Away," "Ponyo") and Studio Ghibli, it was the highest-grossing Japanese film in Japan in 2010 - despite its lack of Hollywood tricks.An Atlantic review summarizes that plot a bit:
Each frame is a gift. Flowing grasses, watercolor wildflowers twitching in the breeze, a burbling stream, the sound of raindrops as they make their first marks on the sidewalk. The images are just vivid enough to allow the audience to imagine the fragrance of a newly dampened sidewalk, rather than be pummeled over the head by a storm so real that there's no room to imagine anything. And among all of this beauty is a pretty little plot.
[The] protagonist is the titular Arrietty (voiced by Bridgit Mendler in the U.S. version of the movie), the 14-year-old only child of a family of "Borrowers"—a race of four-inch-tall, otherwise human-like beings who live in the walls and under the floorboards of the houses of full-sized "Human Beans," as the Borrowers call them. Her family lives in the country house of an elderly woman named Sadako (Carol Burnett), making their way by taking little things that won't be missed by their larger counterparts: a cube of sugar, a square of tissue, a discarded pin. Expeditions into the cavernous world of the Beans are potentially dangerous excursions—rappelling from countertops to floors, or racing around the shadows while hoping to go unnoticed by the pudgy housecat.Tickets and showtimes are not yet on the theater's website. The single-screen theater is located at 4115 Butler Street in Lawrenceville (map).
