The Borrowers

And I'm entranced by the notion of those other very clever little people, who I imagine are dressed in green and wear little pointy hats and shoes, who run frantically around squirting out the ink in just the right way in our bubble jet printers. Now what a job that would be!

The Borrowers, a charming, magical children's film starring John Goodman and Jim Broadbent has introduced me to yet another brand of little people.

They're about four inches tall and scallywag about your house carrying things off. They don't actually steal your pens and ice cream, but "borrow" them. And so that's where all of those paper clips and missing pencils have got to.

In The Borrowers the little people are a family called The Clocks who live underneath the floorboards and within the walls of an inner suburban house inhabited by the full sized Lender family.

The Lenders are being kicked out of their house by a greedy and nasty new landlord (John Goodman). But he's a crook! He's stolen the will of the previous owner and The Borrowers is about getting that will back!

But The Borrowers is really about creating film magic. The absolutely wonderful look of the film and the special effects achieved by director Peter Hewitt (Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey) and his team are a delight.

`The Borrowers is filmed in warm reds and browns, seamlessly blending what must be very special special effects with real sized sets.

The little people swing about on dental floss ropes with torch battery power packs and fling around on incredibly fast aerosol rocket sleds. They have strange toothy faces (are the daughter's (Flora Newbigin's) teeth really like that?) and very individualistic dress sense.

All this sort of thing has been done before on film, but never more inventively than in The Borrowers.

There are some magnificently realised scenes in the movie. An encounter with a pigeon in a house gutter and an escape from a milk bottle in a bottling factory are the stuff of which dreams (or perhaps nightmares) are made.

As we'd expect in this sort of children's movie, John Goodman gets beaten up mercilessly in a film that revels in deluges of cheese and other muck. The humour is very physical with The Borrowers creating a special world of its own, with an American lead actor, and the Clocks adopting almost an inner London English character.

They live in a magical town with an obvious city scape added to the horizon. Fantasy rules.

The Borrowers is based on a series of children's books written by Mary Norton and is yet another refreshing exhibition of the wonders of modern film making.