Charm and magic in proportion

ANIMATOR Hiromasa Yonebayashi found out, in the most direct way possible, about a new project at the legendary Japanese production house Studio Ghibli. He was called into a meeting and handed a copy of a classic English children's tale called The Borrowers, by Mary Norton. He was told that this was the next Ghibli film. Then he was asked if he would direct it.

The man who gave him the book and the opportunity was none other than the founder of Studio Ghibli, master director Hayao Miyazaki. Yonebayashi, who started at the company in 1996 and had worked on a number of its most famous films, said no at first. He tells me, via email, that he'd never thought of directing, and didn't think he was capable of it. Finally, he decided that he wanted the challenge. ''Once the actual work started, nerves and anxiety took over,'' he says, but he had plenty of help from the veterans of the studio, ''and together we were able to create the film''.

Norton's book, the first of a series, was published in 1952. It tells the story of a young girl and her family who live, unobserved, in a country house - they are, after all, only a few centimetres tall. Their home is under the floorboards, and they survive by a kind of scavenging and recycling - they call it ''borrowing''. They take only things whose disappearance will go unnoticed: a sugar cube, a cotton reel, a piece of tissue paper. They are terrified of being seen.

But there is a new figure in the human household, a frail boy who has come to rest before a serious operation. He arrives just as the youngest member of the family, 14-year-old Arrietty, is being prepared for the adventure of life as a Borrower.

Miyazaki had been wanting to make a film of The Borrowers for more than 40 years. It's a much-adapted story that has been turned into live-action movies, a TV series and a new BBC film released for Christmas 2011. For Ghibli's Arrietty, the location was changed to an old house in Tokyo. Otherwise, much of the story remains the same - an exploration of the parallel world of little people, and of what happens when their existence is threatened.

There's a wonderful, imaginatively precise sense of detail, although Yonebayashi says that the filmmakers allowed themselves a certain creative leeway. If Arrietty is 10 centimetres tall, he says, then the cockroach that tries to attack her is much bigger than it really should be. And when she makes her first visit beyond the world of her home under the floorboards, the kitchen she discovers is also much larger. Yet there is a way in which it is accurate - its size reflects the sense of wonder that she feels and her impression of being overwhelmed. ''The strength of animation,'' he says, ''is that you are allowed to fake or exaggerate scale and proportion.''

Everyday objects, recycled by the resourceful family, take on new significance. There were several examples of this in the script, according to Yonebayashi: a pin that Arrietty turns into a sword, double-sided tape, a walkway made out of nails. Much of the rest, he says, he added in storyboarding, ''and the staff did a great job realising it on screen''.

The close contact that the Borrowers have with their environment brings certain things into relief, he adds. They notice things that a human would not, such as ''small prickles around leaves, bumps on a brick's surface''. And it's important to bring this to the viewer's notice, he says. ''I believe that if we also pay attention and include such details, then a world that no ordinary person has ever seen'' can come to life.

Sound, too, was important. The music in Arrietty comes from a young Breton singer and harpist called Cecile Corbel, who loves Ghibli films. No one at the studio knew her, but she happened to send a CD of her songs as a token of her appreciation. To him, the sound of the Celtic harp is ''heart-rendingly cute, and an exact match for the world of Arrietty.''