The Borrowers (1997)

The Borrowers arrives from 1997, a period when a family four inches tall could carry an entire picture without anyone pausing to ask what they stood for. Peter Hewitt directs with a brisk, unfussy hand. The result is a children's adventure of the old school: household traps, a chase through a dairy, a flatulent bloodhound, and John Goodman perspiring through a villain's wardrobe. Our classificatory duties here are mercifully light.

The lone flicker of ideological activity belongs to the antagonist. Ocious P. Potter is a crooked lawyer scheming to demolish a family home so he can raise condominiums on the lot. This is the greedy developer of nursery rhyme, a stock figure built to be foiled. The film distrusts one dishonest man; it holds no grudge against property itself. Arrietty, the daughter, is plucky and takes initiative, sneaking out alone and later commandeering an aerosol-propelled roller skate. That is the pluck of countless children's heroines before her. The screenplay never stops to congratulate itself, and no speech is delivered on the subject.

The cast is uniformly white and British, a fact the film regards as unremarkable, which it is. No romantic configuration strays from the conventional. The human and borrower divide is a matter of species and scale, not an allegory for anything civic. There is no environmental grievance, the demolition being a question of property law. Small stature is a fantasy premise, not a statement about bodies. Nobody is neurodivergent. There is no history to revise, the setting being present-day and invented. As for the moralizing, it is simply absent. The Borrowers wants only to entertain, and it succeeds with a cheerfulness that leaves the analyst little to do but note the silence of the pulpit and file the picture accordingly.