Studio Ghibli’s next film will be an adaptation of Mary Norton’s The Borrowers. Entitled Karigurashi no Arrietty (lit. The Borrower Arrietty), the film will be the directorial debut of Hiromasa Yonebayashi, who has worked as an animator on previous Ghibli films, including Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, Howl’s Moving Castle, and Spirited Away.
The original, Carnegie Medal-winning 1952 novel revolves around the “little people” — 10 centimeters (about 4 inches) tall — who live underneath the floorboards of an English country house. (The Japanese title literally means “the little people under the floor.”) 14-year-old Arrietty and the rest of the Clock family live in peaceful anonymity as they make their own home from items “borrowed” from the house’s human inhabitants. However, life changes for the Clocks when a human boy discovers Arrietty. Ghibli’s adaptation will transport the setting from 1950s England to the Tokyo neighborhood of Koganei in 2010.
More information can be found here and here. The official Japanese website — see image above — can be found here.
Karigurashi no Arrietty will open in Japanese theatres in the summer of 2010.