The Tv series was The Littles, from a different author but very similar in nature DIC was the animation studio.
The only real issue with the borrowers is that they did not “borrow” as far as I can tell but stole. As the items did not seem to be returned, not to mention that to borrow the person owning the object must give consent.
Having not read the source books they may have at some point but I can not say for sure.
The Borrowers say they only take things the average sized people will not miss. The humor in it is there are times
when we say “what happened to that small object? It seems to have disappeared”, and the story imagines that small people took off with it...also the small ones say, “we don’t steal.
We borrow.” (Rationalization...a self-defense mechanism.)
The BBC Christmas special version of the Borrowers (spoiler alert) shows that the average sized family could lose their house. But it turns out that the tiny ones had “borrowed”
a valuable coin. The coin gets “returned” and voila, the day is saved as it’s worth a lot of money as a rare coin. They can keep their house.