Big Shoes, Miniature Anarchy, and Pure 90s Video Store Nostalgia: Peter Hewitt’s The Borrowers Hits Blu-ray

If you grew up rent-scrolling the family section at blockbuster or your local mom-and-pop store in the late 90s, Peter Hewitt's 1997 adaptation of The Borrowers was an inescapable pick. It sat between Home Alone knockoffs and weird live-action Disney experiments, with a cover of a microscopic family peeking out from under a floorboard while John Goodman loomed over like an angry, suit-wearing thumb. It was a movie you rented when every copy of Space Jam was checked out, brought home on a rainy Saturday, and realized was actually just a weird, chaotic affair. Alliance Entertainment has put it out on a Blu-ray under their Retro VHS banner, complete with a heavy-cardstock slipcover to mimic a sun-faded tape box with fake sticker distress and black spine edges.

Let us be real about what you are getting on the disc itself. It is a completely barebones package. You slot the disc into your player and get a dead-simple static menu with a play button and a scene selection menu. There are no new recorded retrospectives with the cast, no director commentary detailing the practical effects work, no vintage behind-the-scenes featurettes pulled from the old laserdisc, and not even a theatrical trailer to round things out. Paying strictly for the physical packaging presentation and a clean 1080p transfer of a movie that spent most of its home video life stretched out on a blurry 4:3 VHS tape print.

For those who skipped it back in the day, the story takes Mary Norton's classic British children's books and injects it with a dose of live-action cartoon violence. We follow the Clock family of Pod (Jim Broadbent), Homily (Celia Imrie), and their children Arrietty and Peagreen, tiny four-inch-tall humanoids that live beneath the floorboards of the Lender family house. They survive by borrowing small items that giant humans will not miss, such as safety pins, buttons, postage stamps, and batteries. Things get tossed into chaos when the elderly owner of the house dies, and a corrupt, greed-obsessed lawyer named Ocious P. Potter (John Goodman) hides her actual last will and testament to demolish the property and build luxury high-rise apartments over the lot.

When the Lender family is forced to pack up their stuff and move, young Arrietty gets separated from her parents and teams up with the human child, Pete Lender, to track down the stolen will and stop Potter from wrecking their home. It all culminates in an extended live-action cartoon, with a giant John Goodman getting systematically tortured by little people with makeshift household gadgets, electric wires, cheese spray, and angry exterminator dogs.

The reason The Borrowers stand up as well as it does is down to the incredible physical set design and John Goodman throwing himself into playing a monster. Director Peter Hewitt and production designer Gemma Jackson put together an odd, timeless aesthetic that feels like a cross between 1950s suburbia, Victorian London, and an oversized steampunk junk shop. The scale work is done almost entirely with huge practical sets and forced perspective rather than early, dated CGI effects. Huge spools of thread, giant matchboxes, and oversized rotary phones all make the miniature world feel physical and heavy, in a way modern digital kid movies rarely do.

There's also John Goodman. The man is a legend, but his work in late 90s family comedies is an art form. He plays Ocious P. Potter like a live-action Wile E. Coyote who is forever on the brink of a massive coronary event. He gets electrocuted, covered in liquid foam, bitten by dogs, smashed through floors, and shot with makeshift mortar cannons, and plays every injury with maximum physical commit. He yells, sweats, and chews through the scenery with no restraint, making him one of the most absurdly aggressive villains in a PG-rated family movie from that entire decade.

The supporting cast is full of recognizable British faces that throw themselves into the nonsense premise surprisingly seriously. Jim Broadbent plays Pod Clock, a tired pragmatist father, and Celia Imrie plays Homily with the high-strung panic of a mother trying to keep her family clean while living in dirt. Also, you get early-career appearances from Hugh Laurie as a cynical, lazy police officer who refuses to take anything serious, and Mark Williams as a bumbling pest exterminator who gets caught up in Potter's insane crusade. Everyone plays it with just enough straight-faced sincerity to keep the slapstick grounded./

Visually, the Blu-ray presentation is a huge jump-up if you haven't seen the film since the CRT TV days. The bright, saturated color palette pops out the screen, showing the warm oranges, deep reds, and moody shadows of the under-floorboard sets. Grain is preserved naturally without looking over-sharpened or scrubbed down with digital noise reduction, keeping the film's rich, cinematic 35mm texture. The audio track is a basic stereo/surround mix, but it handles the boisterous score and chaotic sound effects well, without it blowing out your subwoofer setup.

This is not high art, and nobody involved was trying to make a prestige cinematic masterpiece. It is a messy, slightly cynical deeply silly piece of 90s studio entertainment that relies on clever production design and a giant actor willing to get humiliated for eighty-nine minutes straight. It fits right in the nostalgia sweet spot for people who spent their childhood weekends rent-scrolling the video store aisles for something fun to watch on a sleepover night.

If you are a physical media collector who buys into the retro VHS packaging gimmick, Alliance Entertainment delivered exactly what they promised on the outside of the box. You get a nice-looking slipcover that sits well on a shelf with other 90s favorites, paired with a good transfer that doesn't get talked about nearly enough when people talk about great live-action family comedies. Just keep your expectations in check about the special features, pop the disc in, and enjoy watching John Goodman get tortured by four-inch-tall people.

 The Borrowers will be available to own on 9/29