Anyone familiar with Mary Norton’s novel or with one of the many TV and film adaptations knows that The Borrowers has everything a child’s story should have — fantasy, adventure, and a whole secret world in miniature.
The Borrowers are tiny people who l ive in other people’s houses, borrowing bits and pieces from humans to survive. Borrowers must hide their existence from their human hosts, so they move through the world like tiny secret agents, skilled at concealing themselves from people (and household cats) and creative with the human items they “borrow.”
Conflict arises in The Borrowers because the adolescent daughter of the family insists on trying to make friends with the humans. Her name is Arrietty.
Now her story gets retold via Japanese animation in a film called The Secret World of Arrietty, a new version of The Borrowers voiced by Bridgit Mendler as Arrietty, Will Arnett as her father, and Amy Poehler as her mother. Arrietty is almost 14, and it’s time for her to learn how to be a Borrower. She and her family live under the floorboards in a house, and her father shows her how to negotiate the big spaces and giant furniture of the humans who own that house.
Among the people “upstairs” is Shawn, a frail teenage boy who has come to his great-aunt’s house to try to become healthier. Shawn has a heart problem and parents who work too hard to pay him much attention. He glimpses Arrietty the very first day he arrives.
Shawn spots Arrietty again on her first borrowing mission. When she sees him, she reacts with fear and drops the sugar cube that she was trying to borrow. Later, Shawn leaves the sugar cube in a spot where he knows Arrietty will find it. They slowly begin to become friends; in a crisis, when the housekeeper discovers Arrietty’s mother and traps her, Arrietty goes to Shawn for help.
The Secret World of Arrietty
is often beautiful to look at. The characters exist in a lush, pastoral world where every flower and leaf (in hand-drawn 2D) is a treat for the eyes; oddly, the characters are not brought to life nearly as impressively as the landscape is. Facial expressions are sometimes blank, and flat affect vocal work doesn’t help.
The Secret World Of Arrietty is a sweet, mild place, and possibly too mild for junior audiences raised on raucous Saturday morning cartoons and noisy 3D movies. Too bad the story couldn’t match the splendid visuals.
Stop smiling, Kris HoldenRied. Literally, stop smiling.
That’s not far from the full scope of direction Holden-ried was given for his role as Dyson in the second season of Lost Girl, which currently is airing Sundays on Showcase.
“No, it hasn’t been a fun season to be Dyson,” HoldenRied admitted. “I’m looking forward to season three.
“I’ll be glad to be done with this. Not to be able to feel love sucks.”
Lost Girl is a Canadian fantasy series starring Anna Silk as Bo, a “free agent” Succubus trying to survive in the cutthroat light and dark work of Fae. Holden-ried’s Dyson is a wolf-shifter and Bo’s previous love interest, but at the end of the first season Dyson made a sacrifice to save Bo’s life.
Dyson bargained away what mattered to him most, which was his ability to feel love for Bo.
“( The producers) couldn’t figure out a way to ( wrap up Dyson’s no-love story arc in the middle of the season) without it being climactic. So something that was supposed to be sort of short- lived became an entire season- long arc of basically Dyson being a self-tortured, miserable jerk.
“They did definitely take a lot of bullets from my gun ( as an actor). How do you play the absence of something? How do you play not being able to feel something?”
With Dyson being a main character in Lost Girl, viewers still had to be engaged and interested in his manoeuvres.
“We didn’t want Dyson to become an apathetic character, because an apathetic character is very uninteresting,” HoldenRied said. “So we made it that he can feel everything else except for love, and he also can feel the absence of love. So Dyson reacts to that with anger, frustration, self-destructive behaviour.
“There were thoughts about making the role even darker,