| abstract
| - A series of children's fantasy books by Mary Norton (who also wrote Bedknob and Broomstick). Arrietty Clock lives with her parents under the floor in the house of a "human bean". They live by "borrowing" from the human beans (it's only "stealing" if you take things from another Borrower), but never anything that might be missed; a Borrower must never be seen by a human bean, or let a human bean in any way know they exist. Unfortunately, Arrietty is a little too curious for her own good, and ends up talking with a human boy. The boy ends up fetching little things that might help the Borrowers, things they couldn't get for themselves. Arrietty's parents, Pod and Homily, are frightened and upset, but eventually (if somewhat stiffly) accept that the human boy is going to help them and not harm them. However, soon enough the adults see the Borrowers too, so the family hides and has to pack up and leave the house. They head out into the wild -- like Bilbo, they're not the adventurous type -- and try to make it to a house their relatives moved to years ago. En route, they encounter Spiller, a loner who says little but sees much. He's a great hunter, and although their initial interaction is cool (as in "not quite frigid"), soon enough they warm to him. (At times it even looks like he and Arrietty might eventually get together, but this never happens within the series. She settles down with a guy called Peagreen who lives in a greenhouse.) He helps them out of a couple tight spots, including when they're captured by humans, and eventually even shows them a miniature village they can live in (crafted by a human, but they stay decently hidden so he doesn't see them). Aside from the first minor "captured by humans" bit, they are captured one major time, when a human husband and wife decide to put the Borrowers on display in a glass house where they will not be allowed any privacy. Luckily, they manage to escape. An enjoyable series that made for a pretty good couple of movies, starting with a 1973 made-for-TV Hallmark hall of fame movie. The 1997 film starring John Goodman takes a far more urban setup, overturns the idea that the Borrowers have a low population (the ending is rather like that of Toy Story), and in general is not as faithful to the books as the original movies were. It at least avoided being In Name Only by keeping the members of the Clock family more-or-less true to their book characterizations, although even there they recast Peagreen (a minor character in the books) as Arrietty's Annoying Younger Sibling. It also pretty much dropped the original plot in favor of one centering around the scheme of Goodman's Amoral Attorney villain to demolish the house where the Borrowers live. It also features a young Tom Felton. A BBC TV movie adaptation was released for Christmas 2011, featuring Stephen Fry and Christopher Eccleston. It's even more of an In Name Only adaptation, taking place in a modern-day city, featuring a mostly original plot and drastically altered characters -- the most notable ones being Spiller, who's been changed from Noble Savage to a Troubled but Cute biker boy in a red leather jacket, and the human Mildeye, who's gone from an evil, brutal Rom to an evil-but-bumbling professor played by Stephen Fry. Like the 1997 movie, it completely goes away from the "borrowers as a dying race" idea; here there turns out to be enough of them in one place to populate an entire underground city (built on the platform and partly on the tracks of an abandoned railway station). The critics noted, though, that while the movie had very little to do with Mary Norton's books, it still stayed fairly true to the themes and spirit of them, making it more of a Pragmatic Adaptation. Extremely pragmatic. The Beeb had previously run a couple of miniseries in the nineties that were more faithful adaptations of the books. The first book has also been adapted into an animated movie by Studio Ghibli, titled The Borrower Arrietty (released in the US as The Secret World of Arrietty). And there was much rejoicing.
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