Studio Ghibli – Japan’s finest purveyors of earthy handdrawn animation (Ponyo, Spirited Away) – lend their gentle sensibility to the story of The Borrowers.

Although every bit as charming and exciting as fans could hope, the film’s greatest pleasures lie is its witty reimagining of the world from its heroine’s pocket-sized perspective. From the discarded postage stamps repurposed as artworks to the dual-sided sellotape that enables SpiderMan-like adhesion to walls, the everyday is made both novel and uncanny via this fun extrapolation of the maxim that ‘one person’s trash is another’s treasure’.

Gerard Elson is from Readings St Kilda.