The bad? Well, there's starting to be an element of self-parody or plagiarism in Ghibli movies: as it opened, I thought 'ah, the road from _Spirited Away_, ah, this boy looks exactly like _Howl's Moving Castle_ or maybe that other movie, ah, this is the cat from _Whisper of the Heart_!'
The serious issue though is that the plot is *terrible*. The servant Haru is just pointlessly malevolent and hates the little people - literally, she even scowls and watches from the shadows and locks the prince in his room! The closest the movie comes to any kind of reason is one or two throw-away lines about them being thieves. Sho has no need for a 'heart disease' (or as I like to call it, 'anime sickness') except, like Haru herself, to fake some dramatic tension; further, he is made to hold the idiot ball repeatedly, like when he rips off the roof of their house without a second thought (what could possibly go wrong?!) or when he carefully hides all his traces... except for the crowbar lying right in front of the door (how did the door even close? how did Sho forget about the crowbar in the first place?). The dialogue between Arrietty and Sho at the end is ham-fisted, Miyazaki at his environmental moralizing worst (with some potential cracks at the Japanese for not reproducing, if I'm not reading that in).
The plot could've been perfectly fine just laying out the gradual meeting of humans and Borrowers and finishing with them living in the doll house, but no... About the only good thing I have to say about the story itself is that it had the honesty to have the Borrowers move out, and didn't do a last-minute Hollywood 'all is fixed' ending.
