Quartile rating: 6/10 · 1 rating
The four-inch-tall Clock family secretly share a house with the normal-sized Lender family, "borrowing" such items as thread, safety pins, batteries and scraps of food. However, their peaceful co-existence is disturbed when evil lawyer Ocious P. Potter steals the will granting title to the house, which he plans to demolish in order to build apartments. The Lenders are forced to move, and the Clocks face the risk of being exposed to the normal-sized world.
The Borrowers is a cheerful, inventive family film that brings Mary Norton's beloved miniature world to life with considerable visual creativity. The production design and practical effects used to realize the size-differential world are genuinely fun and imaginative, earning a solid cinematography mark. The cast, led by John Goodman as the pantomime villain, commits enthusiastically to the broad comedic tone. However, the plot is fairly thin and formulaic — a generic evil-lawyer-wants-to-demolish-the-house framework that adds little beyond the source material's premise. The ending wraps up too neatly and predictably, relying on slapstick convenience rather than satisfying resolution. Novelty gets a slight bump for the distinctive visual approach to miniaturization, though the adaptation does not push into especially singular territory.