The Secret World of Arrietty

The sick boy, Sho, loves Arrietty. He also nearly ends her family twice. He carries her whole house, a beautiful dollhouse kitchen, up to their hiding place as a gift, and the act of bringing it into the open exposes them to the housekeeper who then traps the mother in a jar. Sho's love is the grasping mind. It wants to help, to hold, to give, to make contact, and every movement of that wanting endangers the very thing it cherishes. The Buddhist teaching threaded through the film is that attachment and destruction are the same gesture viewed from two sides.

Watch the moment Sho tells Arrietty, calmly, that her species is dying out, that they are doomed to disappear. He means it as honesty. She hears it as violence, and she is right to. The mind that fixes a fragile being inside a concept of its own extinction has already begun to erase it. The love that does not kill is the love that lets go: Sho's final gift is not the dollhouse but the sugar cube she keeps, and the release of his grip. He heals, the film implies, because he finally learns to hold something without closing his hand.

In Jung the "little people," the dwarfs and household spirits of folklore, are the autonomous small figures of the unconscious, the tender inner life that the daylight ego routinely tramples. Sho is a boy facing heart surgery, alone in his great-aunt's house, cut off from his own vitality. The Borrowers living beneath his floor are precisely what a depressed, dying-feeling psyche most needs to recontact: the miniature, resourceful, still-living part of the self that survives on almost nothing and knows how to make a home out of scraps.

The housekeeper Haru is the shadow of this dynamic, the part of the ego that does not want to relate to the small interior life but to exhibit it, cage it, prove it exists. When Haru captures the mother, she is the collector who kills the numinous by pinning it. Sho's task, and the film's, is to protect the little people without possessing them, to let them leave for the river valley alive. He gives Arrietty back her freedom, and in doing so his own heart, quite literally, is mended.

Other Ghibli films about the fragile inner life and the cost of contact: When Marnie Was There (Yonebayashi's other haunted, healing child), The Cat Returns (the small world beneath the visible one), Whisper of the Heart (the tender interior made real).