Director Lee Hirsch’s well-intentioned documentary soberly depicts the emotional toll of bullying in the lives of five American families. It’s utterly heart-wrenching stuff but only superficial in structure and in rigor, short on revelation, and tailored to an already wised-up audience that won’t get much from it beyond validated indignation, although that is something. (Also, some jittery focus distracts from otherwise usefully intimate digital cinematography.) What’s saddest, but again no new discovery, is the sense of bullied kids being let down by leadership failures from the adults in their lives, including parents, school administrators, and, come to think of it, crusading documentary-makers too. There is some hope to think that if they can make it through (and not all of them can), these brave young souls might themselves one day improve our lousy pseudo-grown-up-addled world.

One reason it’s so hard to get a table at Sukiyabashi Jiro, the unprepossessing sushi restaurant wedged beneath an office building just next to a Tokyo subway station, is that the place doesn’t actually have tables. It’s just one narrow counter and 10 seats. Another reason is its three-star rating from the Michelin Guide, which means people with the authority to say so think it’s officially worth traveling to Japan from wherever you are just in order to eat there.

Cleverly, filmmaker David Gelb got in by making a documentary about the proprietor. Jiro Ono is widely reported to be world’s best sushi chef, and as “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” reveals, he sets an elegant if also daunting example for devotion to his work. The title of Gelb’s reverie does not exaggerate. “I would jump out of bed at night with ideas,” recalls the 85-year-old master, whose lifelong meditation on those ideas seems worth tracking, cinematically, whether you covet that elusive reservation or not.

The first question: “What defines deliciousness?” Gelb proceeds judiciously to establish the necessary conditions for devising an answer. It seems useful, generally, to understand that umami is both a harmony of flavors and the feeling it provokes, which makes you say “ahh.” It also seems useful to really be able to concentrate on that understanding. Between shots of highly skilled hands at work and glistening fish-flesh closeups come glimpses of family history, supplier subcultures, and other useful bits of context, but the prevailing aesthetic is an artful, slow-motion austerity. And if Gelb’s veneration becomes repetitive, it must be at least in part to establish character essentials. We learn early on that Jiro gets on the subway from the same place on the same platform every day; it becomes clear, and crucial, that the restaurant’s asceticism extends directly from the man himself.

The unexpected elation of “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” is that it doesn’t just make you want to eat. It makes you want to be great at making something. And it shows you how: To be ashokunin, a sort of socially responsible and spiritually resolute artisan, clearly requires much dedication, patience, and pride. Other trade secrets in this case include 45-minute octopus massage, avoidance of serving appetizers, and carefully pressurized body-temperature rice acquired from a dealer who says he won’t sell it to a big hotel because only Jiro really knows how to cook it.

Also, his staff’s apprenticeship is long and strenuous. One subordinate reports needing more than 200 tries to grill an egg custard that meets the boss’s standards. Jiro’s older son, still an apprentice at age 50, works by his side and evidently forever in his shadow. Across town his younger son runs another sushi restaurant, known for a more relaxed atmosphere by customers who tend to feel nervous when eating in front of Jiro. It’s true: He hovers. Even one eloquently effusive food writer admits to getting nervous with each visit. (Which is not at all to say unsatisfied.) What’s more, the son who left was informed by his father upon departure that he’d have no home to return to. Well, yes, eschewing failure is one way to encourage success.

Pleasure taken seriously does have its consequences, but these also include a reciprocity of zeal. Certainly, by now, sushi dreams of Jiro too.

It’s a little unnerving how the “American Pie” movies are starting to add up to some kind of national sociology. With the latest, “American Reunion,” exuding a relaxed sense of duty, the whole franchise seems like the adolescent sex-farce equivalent of Michael Apted’s “Up” series of documentaries, in which, since age seven, the same group of kids has been visited by a film crew every seven years. Presumably in both cases this will continue until they’re all dead and so are the rest of us.

So, not that you asked, but here’s what’s going on with the class of ’99. The hapless Jim (Jason Biggs) and horny Michelle (Alyson Hannigan), parents to a toddler now, are cordially married but sexually disconnected. Sweet beefcake Oz (Chris Klein) settled into sub-ESPN sportscasting after losing a TV dance contest. Nonentity Kevin (Thomas Ian Nichols) compensates for “Real Housewives” date nights with a gently manicured beard. Pseudo-sophisticate Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) has fashioned himself as a bohemian drifter, and rude-boy Stifler (Seann William Scott), now with shit-eating grin wiped from face, grumbles his way through corporate-temp subservience.

Collectively they yearn for regression, and so, on the occasion of a 13th high school reunion, they return again to their shared adolescent idyll of suburban Michigan, where life once was so raunchy and so sweet. The premise of this fourth piece of “Pie” (not counting however many slices have gone straight to DVD) suits its franchise-wide proclivity: getting sentimental about the shame-based comedy of crude bodily functions. Magnanimously not possessive of the market they’d once cornered, the lads indulge another round of untoward yet healing high jinks — penile indignity here, beer-cooler bowel movement there — plus the occasional telegraph flash of This Is a Reference to the Previous Films. At least some water under the bridge makes their friendship more plausible.

As ensemble vehicles, reunion movies can be hard to steer. Writer-directors Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg labor over a lot of set-up, a lot of wrap-up, and some perfunctory in-between bits to tie it all (very loosely) together. It takes too long to set the table for tasty bonbons like Stifler’s rattling discovery that half his lacrosse team was gay (“I thought they were wrestling,” he whimpers), or the latest awkward talk between Jim and his dad (the ever-game Eugene Levy). Ali Cobrin is necessarily appealing as the grown-up girl next door whom Jim used to babysit, now suddenly a naked drunken flirt, but overall the movie could be kinder to her. As it could to Mena Suvari and Tara Reid, here merely blonde and hard to tell apart.

Being so focused on shoehorning sequel-mandated shtick into the latest life-stage anxiety, “American Reunion” seems at times strangely humorless. Audience willing, it becomes funny almost in spite of itself, and therefore at least gives off a minor cathartic charge. So it goes with millennial nostalgia; sometimes it’s easier said than done to really keep in touch.

Odds are, by the time you read this, you’ll already have seen it. Possibly more than once. So let’s discuss. How about those Hunger Games, huh?! Speaking of odds, let’s speak of odds, as they often do in “The Hunger Games.” “May the odds be ever in your favor,” they say. Of course, if you’re playing, the odds are never in your favor. They’re at least 23 to 1 that you’ll die. Murder, starvation, exposure — options do abound; it’s just that none of them actually are favorable. The only way to win is to live. And to be sure nobody else does.

But you knew this. You knew this is what happens when pairs of adolescents from a dozen districts of some future former America annually are chosen by lottery for a woodsy death match on live TV, as has been going on for nearly three quarters of a century now. You knew because you’ve read the first book of Suzanne Collins’ bestselling young adult sci-fi trilogy, and you’ve readied yourself for the movie.

The best part of which is Jennifer Lawrence as its heroine, a coal miner’s daughter from District 12, where the fashion tends toward migrant-mother chic and folks glumly congregate like movie Jews en route to concentration camps — setting them starkly apart from those foppish capital-city richies who sanction the mandatory bloodsport (and, what’s more insidious, the mandatory viewing thereof) as some twisted pillar of a decadent glam couture. Boilerplate dystopia plot aside — and the script, by Collins, Billy Ray, and director Gary Ross, has its own battles to fight against pseudo-suspense and other bloating filler — the least guilty pleasure of “The Hunger Games” is seeing Lawrence go so agilely through a progress of contexts in which she stands out.

Here, given her character’s particulars — variously absent parents, little sister to look after, brutal quest to endure, woods — you may even have noticed with a peculiar frisson that what you’re watching is basically “Winter’s Bone” reconfigured as an overproduced blockbuster. Still it’s a great relief to find Lawrence not playing just another scantily clad ass-kicker, nor a wispy nonentity torn between mythical monster men. (Although yes, she is quite the archer, and yes, a love triangle does take shape, with Josh Hutcherson as her closest opponent and Liam Hemsworth as her brooding back-home pal). Contrasting peripheral not-quite-characters played with brightly costumed monotony by Elizabeth Banks, Woody Harrelson, Wes Bentley, Toby Jones, Stanley Tucci, Lenny Kravitz, and Donald Sutherland, Lawrence brings a steady presence and enough unabashed vulnerability to plausibly survive the flamboyant savagery at hand. This is partly a parable of show business, after all.

Reportedly inspired by Collins’ experience of flipping channels between war coverage and reality TV, it all seems appropriately more mind-numbing than groundbreaking or actively satirical. And there’s an unfortunate sense of money having been siphoned from the special-effects budget into the marketing budget. But fair enough: As you certainly know, it is important for young people to be made aware of the pop-cultural touchstones about which it is their birthright to feel possessive. Daunted neither by its provenance in Collins’ beloved books nor by the precedents of its many similar on-screen ancestors, the movie of “The Hunger Games” defies the odds by not bothering itself about them. And isn’t that just the sort of fighting spirit you like to see?

As Jonah Hill and Michael Cera in “Superbad” reminded us, Hollywood has a long, goofy tradition of hiring post-teenaged actors to portray teenaged characters. Hill and Channing Tatum together in “21 Jump Street” suggest a corollary tendency to make age-inappropriateness itself the center of our attention.

An irreverent movie comedy rehash of a premise taken way too seriously by late-1980s TV, it’s also a fun-house mirror for a deranged society in which the less you look like a teenager, the more amusing it apparently is to act like one. The question of how we got here has many answers, but one thing to remember about the late 1980s is that it was a time of just enough amiably hysterical anti-drug conservatism to posit the narc as ultimate bad-boy outsider. The premise that baby-faced cops go undercover in high schools, as mounted by a then-fledgling Fox network, somehow could launch Johnny Depp’s career.

A hooky but untenable absurdity, in other words, and the new movie can’t resist playing it as such. This “21 Jump Street” gets right to work, whisking its duo of rivals-cum-buds right along from high school to police academy to a genteel bike patrol, promptly botched, and then back to school, now preposterously undercover. (Wait for that easy zinger about how police departments, like entertainment companies, jadedly recycle their old ideas.) There, armed with only a bond of mutual incompetence, they uncomfortably discover that recent pieties of political correctness have upended expected social codes. Thus Hill’s chubby sensitive thespian stands tall at last on the precipice of popularity, with Tatum’s blunt beefcake jock consigned to further schooling from a fringe of science geeks.

“Glee” is duly blamed, and the man-boys proceed with their mission particulars. These include negotiations with a foul-mouthed boss played by Ice Cube, a lust-crazed teacher played by Ellie Kemper, a grounded love interest played by Brie Larson, and a smarmy cool-kid drug dealer played by James Franco’s little brother Dave. The drug is synthetic, but its name, HolyFuckingShit, seems wholly organic to users’ experiences.

Unexpectedly more than merely another crass exercise in raiding the dusty cupboards of pre-existing programming, “21 Jump Street” offers at least as much personality as should be expected from a film conceived by Hill, scripted by Michael Bacall, also of “Project X”and “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” and directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller of “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.” Some movies, especially comedies, can seem collaborated to death, but this one actually benefits from its slapdash pluralism.

Actually, the most appealing thing about it is that sense of conspiratorial abandon — of Tatum really wanting the world to know that he’s actually sweet and fun and funny, and of Hill totally having his back with that. Joining Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg in “The Other Guys,” and Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in “Hot Fuzz,” these two sit well together among recent on-screen pairs of improbable cops.

This may not tell us much about modern law enforcement, but it does imply a social contract of sorts. Somehow without falling apart entirely, “21 Jump Street” combines flip vulgarity, daffy warmth, and antic wish fulfillment about revisable high-school history. It couldn’t be more suited, therefore, to the odd entertainment-property paradox of movies containing such adolescent indulgence that actual adolescents may not see them unless accompanied by adults. In this case adulthood means being old enough to cough up twenty bucks worth of half-ashamed nostalgia for the original program. (And it may be reported, without spoilage, that the filmmakers do their requisite-cameo duty stoutly.)

No, it’s not like anybody begged Hollywood for another impish semi-spoof in the subgenre of More Shit From When We Were Growing Up Turned Into Shit That Now Reminds Us We’re Getting Old. But if “21 Jump Street” the show could be said to deserve a movie, this one must be it.

“John Carter,” the movie, has been in development for a hundred years. No wonder it’s such a tangle of time, space, and narrative point of view.

John Carter, the man, hails from Virginia, but he was in Arizona when he wound up on Mars. That was in 1868, but our tale, as unfurled in a 2012 film based on a 1912 story, begins in 1881. And he is its protagonist, although the account is relayed through his young nephew, who, with our disbelief kindly suspended, will grow up to become the prolific pulp fictioneer Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Meanwhile Burroughs’ swashbuckling sci-fi serial will grow up to become a movie by the director of “Wall-E,” with writing help from the author of “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” and starring the heartthrob from “Friday Night Lights.” If the result feels disorderly, not to mention derivative of “Star Wars” and “Avatar” and everything in between, well, that’s an irony given source material without which those movies might not have existed. And that’s just what a century’s worth of development will do.

Carter, played by Taylor Kitsch, is a former Confederate Army captain who finds himself teleported to the red planet, where lesser gravity lets him leap tall boulders, and toss them around, like a superhero. How he breathes and keeps warm is not explained, but we get the idea that actually there is an atmosphere on Mars, and it retains at least enough sunshine that a loincloth is all the outerwear one really needs.

Also, there are Martians. They aren’t little green men but big ones, tall and reedy, with four arms each and facial tusks. With their brute exoticism and clannish codes of honor, they exude an old colonialist’s idea of noble savagery, as quaintly outdated as the astronomical understanding that inspired their fictive world. But these folks are not the only residents of Barsoom, as Mars is known in the local parlance. In fact the place is all too crowded. It has humans, of sorts, as well, and the problems they bring.

Having tried to put America’s War Between the States behind him, Carter inadvertently catalyzes a war between Martian city states. Theirs is more of a swords-and-sandals affair, if Lynn Collins as the lusciously bikinied scientist-warrior princess is any indication, but our man seems up to it. And with a visual scheme so handsomely commensurate with fantasy artist Frank Frazetta’s eye-popping covers for Burroughs’ books, well, who wouldn’t be?

The princess’ father, an affably pudgy Ciarán Hinds, has arranged for her marriage to a blandly villainous Dominic West, who’s been terrorizing the planet with powers on loan from a meddling Mark Strong, the apparent alpha in a trio of lurking non-Martian aliens. From here things become more tangled.

It all seems rather a lot to handle for Pixar mainstay director Andrew Stanton, here making his live-action debut. Written by Stanton, his writing partner Mark Andrews, and superstar novelist Michael Chabon, himself a longtime Martian-adventure freak (see also “The McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales”), “John Carter” comes across as smart and sleek but also strangely subservient to its own rich legacy. It’s just not special enough.

Kitsch certainly has the right last name for this enterprise, and more or less the right cipher-like presence: a vessel into which 12-year-olds of all ages might project themselves. (Sometimes he seems like a poor man’s James Franco. But then, sometimes, so does James Franco.) His other co-stars include Willem Dafoe, Thomas Haden Church, and Bryan Cranston, variously obscured by fabricated pixels or facial hair. And if they too appear periodically to fade into the scenery, at least the scenery is exquisite.

Living up to reported uncertainty about whether it’ll become a trilogy, “John Carter” feels hurried and crammed. Of course that’s true to its source material too. Ultimately the movie, like the man, is lighter on its feet than expected. Never does it lack commitment to its own pulpy panache. You want to tease it for being so earnest, but there’s no time, and too much to take in, so instead you just keep the fistfuls of popcorn coming.

One charming feature of Marie Losier’s new documentary is its total failure of expository consideration. If “The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye” seems randomly beamed in from outer space, that just goes to show its commitment to the material. For the sake of easier access, here’s some background: Once upon a time, one Genesis P-Orridge, frontman of proto-industrial noise outfit Throbbing Gristle, fell in love with a pretty young dominatrix called Lady Jaye. Their partnership was a charmed accumulation of poignant whimsy and unbridled creativity; eventually, maybe inevitably, it involved an ultimate consummation, the “Creating the Pandrogyne” project, in which the soul mates underwent plastic surgery to more closely resemble each other. When Lady Jaye died in 2007, or “dropped her body,” as Genesis nicely puts it, hearts were broken but the spell was not. Appropriately enough, Losier’s crazy quilt of home-movie and performance footage seems giddily undomesticated. Reveling unaplogetically in the self-exploratory allures of bohemian East Village chic, this is simply one sincere and affecting answer to the question of how to really live and love like an artist.

In a spirit of emancipation from hostility between their respective governments, the Oscar for “A Separation” becomes a goodwill gesture from citizens of America to citizens of Iran.As such it is well deserved. Writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s exceptional film rewards our curiosity to understand what Iranian life really is like. His answer is frank but also invitingly coy: It is like life.

We begin within a divorce-court hearing, from the judge’s point of view. Middle-class husband and wife Nader and Simin (Peyman Maadi, Leila Hatami) sit before us: She wants a freer life for their 11-year-old daughter, Termeh (Sarina Farhadi), and so has planned the family’s departure from Iran, but he won’t leave now that his father’s Alzheimer’s has advanced, and he wants Termeh to stay as well.

“Your problem is a small problem,” says the judge. We sense an intention of irony here, and anticipate problem enlargement. Eventually Simin moves out of the house but not out of the country. That leaves Nader needing help with the care of his father (Ali-Asghar Shahbazi), so he hires Razieh (Sareh Bayat), a devoutly religious woman of lower social standing and with domestic difficulties of her own.

Razieh has a temperamental husband, Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini), a very young daughter, Somayeh (Kimia Hosseini), and another child on the way. Before long she also has a falling out with Nader, an ambiguous emotional conflict which prompts more judicial proceedings and escalates into a riveting ensemble examination of honor, pride, truthfulness, and falsity. Maybe not since Kieslowski has a filmmaker gotten so much juice from open-ended courtroom drama.

Plot-wise, “A Separation” might seem at first faintly play-like or schematic. (It certainly and very refreshingly does not seem like the product of a Hollywood-drenched imagination.) But plot, Farhadi knows, need not always be as it seems. People are his priority, in this case people pushed by everyday frustrations, and by each other, to their breaking points. Fundamentally plot is the consequence of human behavior, and these people behave as people do: badly sometimes. Their conflict occurs, we notice, within a mannerly society whose visible self-control appears simultaneously repressive and civilizing. The simultaneity is what matters.

Allowing only an organic symbology of human aggravations, like trouble zipping up a suitcase, Farhadi avoids explicitly cinematic distractions. The camerawork and cutting are just so agile as to go graciously unnoticed. The performances, so effortlessly enlaced, each are independent marvels of subtle clarity. These people, we notice, aren’t just movie characters; they’re souls. And so their simplest gestures — a spontaneous peck on the demented father’s cheek, an anguished glance passed between the daughters — convey great complexity. The film is not strenuous, but it feels like a workout. None of the feeling is cheap.

So much wrenching strife between Nader and Simin, and between him and Razieh, portends a tough future for the watchful Termeh, but we sense that Farhadi won’t let her down. (For starters, Sarina Farhadi is the filmmaker’s own daughter.) It’s a generous assurance — not to mention a fine use of the movie medium. Nations or at least families deserve to hope that within even the biggest possible problem, solution somewhere lurks.

What a nice sly touch that “Pariah” could pass for one of those “black-sounding” baby names studied by the authors of “Freakonomics.” That the title of writer-director Dee Rees’ feature debut stresses instead the dictionary definition of the word seems like playing its game a little too, well, straight. But then, reflexive prudence is after all part of what it’s about.

Coming of age is familiar movie stuff, but “Pariah” functions also as an almost comically selective case study: How to be a queer teenager of color in today’s striving lower-middle-class Brooklyn. In this obviously personal project, informed by Rees’ own experiences (and elaborated from her 2007 short film of the same name), that practically balletic feat of social navigation gets at least some of the dance it deserves.

Alike (Adepero Oduye), a clever high schooler and closeted lesbian, is learning who she is by ruling out who she’s not. Her name is pronounced “Ah-lee-kay,” or reduced to “Lee,” depending which of her parents has said it, and what claim on her they’ve each made. “Incognegro” is the nickname offered by her out bull-dyke pal Laura (Pernell Walker), with a judicious mixture of affection and contempt. Although not without its fascinations, Laura’s scene — the raunchy strip club, the brash hip-hop chic — seems like too much for Lee, who’s shy and sweet and still a virgin, and certainly it’ll never fly with mom or dad.

Her mother (Kim Wayans), a status-conscious medical technician, dotes on Lee with denial couched in repressive religiosity; her father (Charles Parnell), a cop, inclines toward a more supportive stance but can’t seem to help shutting himself off within his own churlish secrets. Lee’s kid sister (Sahra Mellesse) cares less about identity politics than about whether a fraying sibling bond can be shelter enough from the storms of their parents’ shouting matches.

With her whole family thus stifled by ingrained homophobia, it should come as no surprise that Lee has a notebook full of poetry. Inevitably her writing has to do with the anguish of self-categorization — whether to check herself off as butch, femme, bi-curious, or other. Her mother’s attempt to replace the unapproved Laura with a church-friend’s daughter (Aasha Davis) doesn’t go quite as expected, in promising ways, but of course promises among fragile people can be risky. A boiling over ensues, some of which seems forced, some touchingly natural, and viewers’ opinions likely will differ on which is which.

Having been developed via Sundance lab, “Pariah” seems fated to a certain manner of narrative heavy-handedness. For all the modish shallow focus of Bradford Young’s cinematography, it still has a whiff of indie-style After-School Special, and the sense of an individual personality workshopped into weary, festival-slick homogeneity. Yes, Spike Lee is one of the film’s executive producers, but there are 14 others.

Thankfully, Rees maintains her generosity and good instincts. She has the sense to explore her themes not just with signifiers but also with personal gestures. Performed alone on a city bus or in a school bathroom stall, Lee’s assimilation-anxious outfit changes seem so shamefully furtive and dignity-depriving — neither a drag liberation nor a superheroic secret identity shift, but instead and rather grimly the opposite of both. In one forlornly funny moment she’s reduced to fumbling with a flesh-colored strap-on, the flesh in question being white.

Message-movie context aside, Lee’s never-been-kissed routine might easily have gotten Barrymoreishly cloying, but it benefits greatly from Oduye’s powerful, unsentimental presence. It seems miraculous that an actor so comfortable with the camera’s attention could register a character so uncertain of how to be looked at. “Luminous” is the word many critics already have used to describe her, correctly, but something about that particular consensus seems borderline bigoted in itself, as if we all need a beam of reassurance when among so many dark movie faces.

In any case, the makers of “Pariah” deserve much credit for their magnanimity. And for that which makes any coming-of-age story, or coming-out story, worth being a story at all: the authority of empathy.

And for all the singularity implied by Ghibli guru Hayao Miyazaki’s unusual credit, “planning and screenplay by,” it also has a sort of dub-ready universality. Aside from the American English version — written by Karey Kirkpatrick, directed by Gary Rydstrom, and starring the voices of Will Arnett, Amy Poehler, and Carol Burnett — there’s also a British English version, with yet another cast. Not to mention whatever versions exist in other languages. This is one of those all-ages movies whose appeal derives directly from not having much to lose in translation.

Adapted from “The Borrowers,” the first in a series of British children’s books by Mary Norton dating back to 1952, and directed, originally, by Miyazaki protégé Hiromasa Yonebayashi, “Arrietty” portrays the denizens of a stately but rustic country house, particularly the very tiny people who for several generations have subsisted rather resourcefully under its floorboards. One of these “Borrowers,” the eponymous young heroine (voiced by Bridgit Mendler), is a girl on the cusp of adolescence and accordingly eager for adventure. Naturally, this causes some consternation for her taciturn dad (Arnett) and her too-nervous mom (Poehler).

Borrowers live peaceably and preferably unnoticed among humans, known to them as “Beans.” Never mind that the self-applied moniker is a euphemism, as they don’t actually return what they take. Borrowers “borrow” only what they need and what Beans won’t miss — a sugar cube, a Kleenex — and tend to make it last a lot longer than the Beans would anyway. They are models of inconspicuous consumption. It’s fun to watch them work, rappelling from kitchen countertops with earrings used as grappling hooks, and impressive to behold the film’s fully telescopic view of how far down this unwittingly cooperative resource-sharing trickles: Left briefly unattended, that same sugar cube inevitably gets reduced to still smaller bits and carted off by ants to their own tiny unseen home.

If this is sounding low-key, well, yes. The trademark Ghibli animation style prioritizes lush, lovingly drawn and sound-designed atmosphere over high-stakes drama, and that’s literally the beauty of it. You just want to hang out here. (Compare and contrast with the blaring CGI of “Journey 2: The Mysterious Island,” from which escape can’t come soon enough.) Plot is provided, albeit clunkily, as soon as Arrietty gets noticed by Shawn (David Henrie), a sickly Bean boy of about her age (if well beyond her height) who’s been stashed away at the house to rest up before a risky heart operation. Also, the Bean maid, Hara (Burnett), wants to prove that Borrowers exist and redeem herself from a reputation for “losing things.”

Through these tensions, Yonebayashi suggests the mutilating magnification of good intentions transposed between incompatible scales. More than that, though, and maybe more importantly, he animates the gentle wonder of a secret world.