The Secret World of Arrietty

It’s been well over a year since we mentioned the next Ghibli movie that’s on its way to the United States, and now we’re finally seeing an official title and trailer for US release of The Secret World of Arrietty:

The movie is based on the book The Borrowers by English author Mary Norton, and revolves around a small species of people who stand little more than four inches tall and their encounters with their larger human counterparts. And because this is a British-based book, the United Kingdom will be getting their own version with their own dubbing. Here’s their trailer:

Two separate dubs in the same language isn’t unheard of in film: Quebec and France occasionally get different French dubs, as do Portugal and Brazil for Portuguese. But with this story’s distinct British origins (enough so that a live action film is coming out on British television this Christmas), it’s rather expected that they’d want to hear this story with their own take on the dialogue.

This is the first time in the director’s chair for Hiromasa Yonebayashi, a young man who has worked with Ghibli projects that include animation on Spirited Away and Ponyo. Getting some young blood into the world of Ghibli is something of an important move for the company: co-founder (and face of the company) Hayao Miyazaki is now in his 70s, and the less active Isao Takahata is 76. The two of them are responsible for fifteen of the studio’s twenty-one feature films.

The Secret World of Arrietty is coming out in North America is February 17, although it’s been out in the UK (who incidentally have a far more interesting website for the movie than Disney does for the US) since July 29 and will be out on disc there in early January.