A 2010 Studio Ghibli film in which Hayao Miyazaki's name appears only among the screenwriters. Here, once again, Mary Norton's fairy tale "The Miners" is adapted for the screen. The first book about little people (there are four in total) was published in 1952 and received the Carnegie Medal at the same time. This is one of the most important American children's books of the twentieth century and another confirmation that American children's classics do not take root at all on Russian soil. A TV series about miners was made twice, by the Americans and the British, and by the end of the year the BBC will release a second film adaptation, with Stephen Fry and a role specially written for him. In short, this is a special preschool story about a small world that is kinder and more attractive than the big one. True to its traditions, the studio adapted the novel into a universal, quintessentially Miyazaki story about a world passing away forever.

Boy Sho comes to his family's old dacha to receive treatment before heart surgery. The parents of the sick child are divorced, the mother went abroad. As soon as he switches from a walk to a gait, he begins to gasp in the most alarming way and clutch his chest. Under the floor in the living room lives a family of miners - three little people who occasionally raid for sugar and cookies. The old nanny keeps trying to catch them, put them in a jar and poison them with dichlorvos, but the boy, on the contrary, wants to be friends, saves them from the nanny and the cat and carries sugar and flowers to the entrance to the small house. There are more than enough flowers in the film - the whole house is buried in dacha impressionist greenery, the plot is studded with bushes, there is a lawn next to the house, and a stream next to the lawn. Sometimes it rains, and it is not difficult to imagine the idyllic smell emanating from the flowers and bushes. As a result, the miner girl Arrietty and Sho become friends, and on a lawn blooming with poppies, a climactic conversation takes place between them about who is more likely to die - the few miners, powerless in front of billions of people, or a sick, lonely boy.

Although the director of the film is not Miyazaki, but his student and animator of all his important films of the last 15 years, Hiromasa Enebayashi, Miyazaki’s hand is undoubtedly felt here - this is a sad and scary movie. Even if the house is idyllically immersed in greenery, and the living room of the miners is beautifully decorated with flowers, even if dangerous rats only flicker with red eyes in the darkness, and the carnivorous cat ends up being a fat ball of fluffy tenderness, this does not save from the impending danger: someone here will definitely die, at least and not in the frame. Because this fairy-tale world cannot coexist with the real one. You have to choose: either them or us.

"Arietty from the Land of Lilliputians"