Mary Poppins comes back on the end of a kite string, stays with the Banks family for a while, and then disappears on a merry-go-round horse.

A miniature family--Pod and Homily Clock, and their daughter Arrietty--live under the kitchen floor in an old country house. In their tiny home, matchboxes serve as dressers and postage stamps hang on the wall like paintings. Whatever the Clock family needs, they simply "borrow" from the humans who live above them. Only Pod ventures into the house above, because of the danger of being seen by the humans. But Arietty is lonely, and changes all of their...

Tolly comes to live with his great-grandmother at the ancient house of Green Knowe and becomes friends with three children who lived there in the seventeenth century.

A strange friendship develops between an orphaned Chinese refugee who is spending the summer at Green Knowe and a gorilla who has escaped from the London Zoo.