Miyazaki Season: Kiki's Delivery Service (Dir Hayao Miyazaki, 1h 43m, 1989)

I bet you're wondering by now what my favourite Studio Ghibli film is; well, I answered that question about three years ago. It's still Princess Mononoke, a film I've never quite got over since, and which still jockeys for my favourite film of all time, period. Ah, but my second-favourite Studio Ghibli film? Spirited Away? No. Howl's Moving Castle? Third. Any of the four Ghibli films I've reviewed so far in 2023? Also no, though Whisper of the Heart and Nausicaä sit fifth and sixth. Princess Kaguya, or another Isao Takahata film? A mere fourth. No. It may come as a surprise (it does, occasionally for me), that my second favourite Studio Ghibli film is, and will likely always be, Kiki's Delivery Service, the charming, and at some points soul-searching tale of a young witch, Kiki, setting out to make a new life in a new town, and the challenges, triumphs and people she meets along the way.

More than this, though, Kiki's Delivery Service is a film that speaks to me, as it speaks to many artists. musicians, and writers. It is, after all, for all its trappings in the story of a young witch coming of age in a new city, and finding her sense of purpose and place in the world, a film about the creative process, about yoking your passion to the need to put a roof over your head, and how to find passion in what you do when you no longer feel certain about your own creativity. It is also, undeniably, Hayao Miyazaki's writing, his storytelling, at its most charming, all in service to one of Ghibli's great heroines as she goes about making sense of her life. 

The year is 1987, and Ghibli are hard at work making the double bill of Grave of the Fireflies and My Neighbour Totoro, when they are approached by the publisher of a novel for teenage girls; Kiki's Delivery Service, written by the prolific Eiko Kadono, published two years earlier, has been a huge hit, and they want Ghibli to adapt it. Ghibli, however, are struggling to make two films at once, let alone three, but Miyazaki agrees to be the film's producer until a director can be found. However, this search doesn't exactly go to plan: Miyazaki places Sunao Katabuchi, a colleague from his days making anime series in charge, but Katabuchi's script is too dry for Miyazaki's liking and too far from his vision-it will later be revealled that the film's producers will only bankroll the film if Miyazaki is directing.

Returning from a research trip in Scandinavia, most notably Stockholm and Gotland, which will influence the design of the city that Kiki finds herself in, and her childhood home, so Miyazaki takes control of the production, soon running into another problem; Kadono, catching wind of the director's changes, threatens to pull the plug on the entire production until Miyazaki and producer Toshio Suzuki (not for the first time, as Miyazaki had previously travelled to Sweden in the 1970s to seek the rights for Pippi Longstocking from Astrid Lindgren) visit, promptly invite her to the studio, and finally win her over. With Miyazaki now announced as director, so the film's budget, and runtime grew, to the point that, alongside Akira (1988) and Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise (1987), Kiki's Delivery Service because one of the highest budgeted anime films of the 1980s, and of this power trio, the only one to make its budget back, let alone turn a (sizeable) profit.

Kiki's Delivery Service begins with our heroine, listening to the radio, in a typically Miyazakian tableau of the picture perfect rural hillside, before the film rapidly gathers pace; Kiki (Minami Takayama/Kirsten Dunst-this being the first dub produced by Disney as part of a 15-year deal with Ghibli in the late 90s) is a young witch in training, about to leave home as she turns thirteen, to settle as the resident witch in another town. The coming evening seems a perfect night to depart on, despite her mother (a witch herself)'s concern, and her father's protestations, so, with her black cat Jiji (Rei Sakuma/Phil Hartman) in tow, Kiki bids farewell to her family, and, somewhat clumsily at first, takes off on her mother's broom, into the night. The titles roll to the first of two late 80s Japanese pop songs (Rūju no Dengon by Yumi Arai), and Miyazaki's film arrives at its key meditation, of the independence of young women in the modern (or at least, an imagined 1950s saved the blight of the World Wars) world.

Kiki herself is the result of a masterful thematic balancing act. Kiki is, undeniably, the Miyazakian heroine at their most independent, and resourceful, through her magic, but she never becomes too powerful, far from the wish fulfilment that the nascent Mahou Shoujo/Magical Girl provided for teen audiences. Kiki never feels disconnected, nor aloof from the typical teenage girl-this is, after all, the closest Miyazaki has ever made to a film for overtly female teenager audiences, and, even compared to his more action centric films, in a plot entirely original to Miyazaki's film (the novel itself, whilst charming is largely episodic, and Kiki gains the confidence and friendship of the town with little problem) to find her way to happiness and her independence. Miyazaki, simply puts, gives the story of the witch moving to a new town and finding her place stakes, beginning from her arrival onwards.

For all her bravado, especially in the English dub, where Hartman's Jiji is cast more as a snarky, if well meaning foil, externalising much of her interior self-doubt, Kiki is shy-her first encounter in the air is with a far more accomplished witch who has settled into her own town, and the well-meaning Kiki comes off feeling somehow slighted, a sudden rainstorm forcing the duo to take refuge in a train that they later awake to find is transporting them, and cows, towards the sea. Kiki and Jiji take flight, coming across the large city of Koriko, the sequence given an airiness, a perfect evocation of flight, by Joe Hisashi's score, with the frankly beautiful "On a Clear Day", and it is here that the film introduces us, and Kiki to the beautiful sweep of the town, and the ocean that surrounds it, in one of Miyazaki's single greatest sequences.

However, despite the sequence being beautiful, with Kiki immediately falling in love with, and deciding to make the town her home, she does not make the best first impression, nearly crashing her broom into traffic, confronted by a policeman, and brushing off the boy Tombo, (Kappei Yamaguchi/Matthew Lawrence), who has come to her rescue, fascinated by her ability to fly. Moreover, as Kiki tries to find somewhere to stay, with Jiji increasingly pessimistic, so Kiki's dowdy appearance and archaic way of talking (something slightly lost in the English dub), clashes with the fashionable girls of her own age that she passes. Fortunately, whilst trying to find somewhere to stay for the night, so Kiki stumbles into her own solution, assisting the owner of a bakery (Osono (Keiko Toda/Tress MacNeille) in returning a dummy to the child of a customer.

Soon finding herself with a roof over her head, and a job helping in the bakery, so Kiki and Osono realise that Kiki's flying abilities also allow her to deliver goods via her broomstick, and what follows is where the film hews closest to the novel, with Kiki delivering a stuffed toy to the nephew of one of the bakery's customers, only to be accosted by crows, and dropping the toy. Following a comedic sequence in which Jiji has to play the role of the toy, Kiki is able to locate the toy, placate the crows with the help of Ursula, a local artist (a dual role for Minami Takayama/Janeane Garofalo), who she agrees to model for and return it to its owner. Even her friendship with Tombo begins to improve, with the duo testing out a prototypical bicycle powered plane for his aeronautically obsessed club, even if this ends in minor disaster with a test-flight ending with the bicycle falling apart.

However, whilst her first few deliveries and work in the bakery are enjoyable, and Kiki begins to build up a reoccurring group of customers, Kiki once again encounters an obstacle in her path, this time in the form of a delivery in heavy rain, and an ungrateful customer, falling ill with a fever, and soon struggles to understand Jiji, who now simply acts like a normal cat. and who now spends increasing time with the neighbour’s cat. More concerningly, she has also lost her ability to fly, falling into a depressed state that culminates with her accidently breaking her mother's broom when attempting to take off, and only becoming more depressed. It is, in short, a perfect depiction of creative burnout; earlier in the film, in a line familiar to anyone who has ever yoked their skills as an artist or writer or musician to their need to make a living wage, Kiki ponders "Flying used to be fun until I started doing it for a living". Kiki has tried to make money from her passion, only to find it becoming a chore, and eventually, in her lack of self-preservation, her undoing, making herself ill in the process.

It's a poignant moment, Kiki having finally pushed herself too far in pursuit of her passion-as-livelihood-we never see Kiki relax until the loss of her magic forces her to, and bereft of her magic she is depressed and withdrawn. Whilst Miyazaki himself has rarely spoken about creative burnout and artistic block, though a large section of the NHK documentary 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki (2020) sees him openly grapple with it on camera as he attempts to direct and animate Ponyo on A Cliff by the Sea (2008), animation, like all artistic industries, and Japan's animation industry in particular is rife with burnout, sometimes with tragic outcomes. But where magic has helped Ghibli's protagonists overcome adversity in the rest of the Ghibli oeuvre, it is through recovery, as Ursula takes Kiki back to her forest cabin to get away from the complexities of the city and her job.

It is here, through Ursula, that we arguably get Miyazaki's ethos on creativity the strongest, with Ursula encouraging Kiki to make time for herself, to stop thinking about having to create all the time, to enjoy nature, to find time and space in your life to relax, and return to your passion refreshed and rested. Whilst Kiki's finale may see her regain her powers at the moment she needs them most, and feature some of the most spectacular animation that Ghibli have ever put to paper, Kiki's Delivery Service's true victory is this quiet moment between two characters discussing creativity-Kiki comes back stronger, is able to save the day because she now makes time for herself, because she realises, even if it takes most of the film and a fall into creative and depressive malaise to realise it, that she is more than the work she undertakes for the town. Whilst the Disney dub does restore Jiji's voice to him (understandably left in the 2010 dub that hews closer to the feel of the original film, given Hartman's death shortly after the film's American release), it is still a perfect aesop-Kiki no longer needs the external voice of her cat to succeed, as she has now grown in confidence and maturity, and in the process, saved the town from calamity.

Kiki's Delivery Service is not only Ghibli at the height of their artistic powers (and indeed financial power, as the film would be the highest grossing film at the Japanese box office in 1989), but Miyazaki's writing at its most profound, its tale of a young witch arriving in a town, and overcoming adversity to learn her own importance and self-reliance recast as a film about creativity and dealing with artistic block and burnout at monetising your passions. In the intervening three and a half decades, Miyazaki has made films that won, and were nominated for, Oscars, retired half a dozen times, and seemingly mothballed Ghibli at least once-what lies beyond The Boy and the Heron, nobody knows-but rarely has he made a film that remains as wonderful, as charming, and yet as soul-searching as Kiki's Delivery Service, his best film of the 1980s.

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

Next week,and indeed next month, we turn our attention to cinema influenced, and affected by, the Atomic Bomb, beginning with the arrival of cinema's greatest monster in 1954's Godzilla.

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