Reviews of Kiki’s Delivery Service (1985) and related work
- Adaptation: Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989)
- Document: “I Wanted to Show the Various Faces of One Person in This Film” (1989)
Kiki’s Delivery Service (1985
)
Kadono Eiko (writer).
Read in 2022.
I read an audiobook in the original Japanese.
Prompted by her mother, thirteen-year-old witch Kiki decides to move out under the next full moon, by flying her mother’s broom to some place where there aren’t any other witches, and supporting herself there for a whole year. Against her mother’s recommendation, Kiki chooses a city, because she’d like to see the ocean.
It is Miyazaki’s film adaptation that brought me to this book, but it’s pleasant enough. As fantasies go, it’s relatively tasteful and an interesting case of dovetailing into the genre of “kids with jobs”. That motif is not like the Swedish series Lasse-Majas detektivbyrå (2002) where children merely play at having a job. It is rather more like child labour: A child, who does not go to school, leaves home to work full time, under the voluntary supervision of an adult stranger (Osono). In that element of the plot, the “old-fashioned witch” motif taps into an earlier economy where children were forced to work.
References here: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997).
‣ Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989
) – previously
Miyazaki Hayao (writer-director).
In a deeply peaceful alternate Europe, where airships are still in fashion into something like the early 1960s, a witch is going to spend a traditional year away from her friends and parents because she’s recently turned thirteen. She finds a city by the ocean but the bustling people there aren’t very friendly, and she doesn’t have any special skills. The girl begins to worry. A pragmatic artist helps her deal with uncertainty and recover inspiration.
Miyazaki was accustomed to adapting children’s books from his earlier work on World Masterpiece Theater. Perhaps he didn’t have the power or the courage to depart more from Kadono’s original, but all of the changes he did make are good, including the choice of what to leave out. The later chapters of the novel are increasingly silly. The slightly older witch that Kiki meets on her first journey is colder in the film and the chronology is compressed: The book’s Osono has her baby earlier, and the first letter that Kiki writes to her parents ends the film, instead of marking the half-way point of the novel’s year-long stay. Still, it feels only a tiny bit rushed.
After the first two times I saw this subtle coming-of-age fantasy, I felt that it formed a definite rump to Studio Ghibli’s formal debut double feature in 1988. Unlike those earlier films, and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) and Castle in the Sky (1986), Kiki was the first Ghibli film to turn a profit before it left the theatres, but it isn’t necessarily more commercial. In 2020, I saw it a third time, with nieces aged 9 and 12. Despite loving Totoro, they were skeptical of animation, associating it with “fakeness” from experience with US animation. Kiki grabbed them right away. It is a rare gem of a children’s film, with unusual emotional authenticity.
Though at first she seems headstrong, deciding almost on a whim to start her journey, Kiki’s confidence is more limited than in Kadono’s original. We see this in the way she uses tradition as her guide: She goes out of her way to follow both the outdated custom of living alone at 13 and the traditional real-world European image of witchcraft, in a world where witches are marginal and barely useful. This is in contrast to the original novel, where Kiki is both hesitant to leave home and interested in fashion, including a shorter skirt. In her first encounter with Tombo, Kiki clings even to the notion that boys and girls must be properly introduced before they can speak to one another, something the rest of the world has abandoned. She looks perpetually out of place in her unfashionable Satanist-style black witches’ dress and large red bow.
The most salient feature of Miyazaki’s adaptation is not that he added more nostalgia. It’s that he added more realism. In the novel, there is a chapter where Kiki chases a train as it moves through some tunnels, for the purpose of breaking into it and taking out eight fragile musical instruments to fly them back to the city, all at once. She not only succeeds at this, but the sound of her flying back with the instruments is so pretty that it replaces the concert for which the instruments were intended. The book’s original Kiki accepts this dangerous mission because, she says, she’s a witch, and therefore capable. That’s narcissistic fabulism.
When challenged by nature and callous urbanites, Miyazaki’s Kiki initially perseveres, but soon reaches the end of her rope. There are plenty of children’s movies with clumsy or volatile characters, and thousands of children’s movies about finding some personal drive or inspiration, but I know of no other children’s movie where the main character is so realistically moody, or where the dramatic nadir is just her spending a day in bed with a fever after giving up, which the original Kiki never does. The movie’s Kiki doesn’t grab the instruments from the train; that chapter of the novel was not adapted. Neither version of the story has a villain or a typically dramatic threat. Kiki’s failures are her own. It’s all about character and growth, more so in the movie.
The closest thing to a villain in the book is Tombo, a boy who steals Kiki’s broom because he loves flying. The movie’s Tombo is nicer, and because the flight-loving Miyazaki evidently empathized with him, Tombo is pulled into the action sequence that forms the movie’s finale, replacing the train sequence from the book. The new finale also touches on the city’s clock tower, a motif that is central to another fabulist chapter of the book, not otherwise adapted. The funny thing about this change is that it has the girl, Kiki, rescuing the foolhardy male damsel in distress from his own source of inspiration.
Telepathic birds see wind up ahead, something Miyazaki believed all birds do, according to “The Type of Film I’d Like to Create” (1992). The rapidly shifting weather might be a metaphor for mood swings, but even if that’s true, the emotional backbone of the story is striking in its rarity, and the storytelling is excellent. Miyazaki even put in a scene where Kiki goes to the outhouse in the morning after moving into the bakery’s guest room, and she’s so nervous that she hides from the near-silent baker on her way back. These added silences and nuances are illustrative and meditative, like the slow zoom onto Ursula’s painting in the log cabin, but they remain engaging to children. This is a feat.
Still, I wish Miyazaki had found some other motif. Among the film’s traditional notions of witchcraft, witches here fly on their brooms, a tool of domestic femininity. In real life, the tool was used for unpaid work. It probably entered the mythology of witchcraft in the 15th century, where it was an attribute of witches because it suggests both femininity and, by its shape between the legs, a phallus, hence grotesque incongruity. The choice was surely intended to ridicule and stigmatize those innocent women who were tortured and killed in European witch trials in accordance with Exodus 22:18.
Though flying a broomstick started as sexist mockery, Kiki’s Delivery Service—both book and film—use the motif naïvely and without suggesting why the witches are all women or why they use brooms. Perhaps, in enlarging Ursula’s role as Kiki’s mystical life coach, Miyazaki intended to connect the artist’s hard-won confidence and independence to feminist reclamation of the witch motif. As in “The BITCH Manifesto” (1969), the idea would be to “own” witchcraft as an image of female empowerment. In this model, witchcraft is symbolic of any real vocation of a woman’s choosing, hence the practice among Kadono’s witches of going out and getting a job on their own, like second-wave feminists securing political indepence through financial independence. It’s the 9 to 5 (1980) of magical girls. This could connect further to the witch-cult hypothesis of 19th-century US feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage. However, if Miyazaki meant any such thing, the movie doesn’t show it. More likely, he respected Kadono’s choice of the clean pop-culture fantasy version of the motif because it’s whimsical and readily available to the audience.
Despite the obvious, easily provable effectiveness of magic, Kiki’s society looks much as it did in real life at the time, except for the freewheeling mixture of alphabets, spoken languages and architectural styles. Extradiegetically, the setting is inspired by trip to Europe made to adapt various European literature, including Pippi Longstocking. The name of the bakery in the novel, gucchoku panya, is just a pun in and for Japanese, but in the film’s more elaborate pseudo-European setting, it is stylized in writing as “Gütiokipänjä”, jamming metal umlauts into a pun from another world.
Supposedly, this is a Europe where the great wars never happened. This is refreshingly utopian, compared to morally dichotomous schlock like The Black Cauldron (1985). However, without a European Recovery Program, why is the radio chatter American? There is no comment on this, no hint of what happened. Did the entrenched racism and nationalism of pre-WWI Europe just fade away spontaneously? Have the people somehow learned to embrace those horrors without negative effects, the way witches here ride phallic brooms without being hated or burned?
The effects of magic apparently include magic potions and prophecies, and witches’ familiars. Jiji doubles as a Disneyesque funny animal sidekick who loses the ability to talk when Kiki’s magic fades, another intrusion of added realism, faintly suggested but otherwise absent in the book. No scholars or businessmen are shown taking an interest in any of this. Instead, incongruously, Tombo’s club project suggests that the huge ontological ramifications of magic are being forgotten like Jiji’s language as technology replaces some of the economic functions of witches. Clearly, Miyazaki put the solid emotional core above the internal logic of the setting; a step down from the harmony of Castle in the Sky (1986).
The result is a creeping sense of inconsistency. This extends even to character and colour design. That thing in Kiki’s hair makes her look like a moekko stereotype, and the choice of showing her black hair as black but her black dress as purple is a kind of formalism likewise running counter to realism. Despite the added realism, the whole film reads like fabulism and wishful thinking about history. Fortunately, these problems are orthogonal to the things I like about the movie. Though its world is annoyingly shallow, its characters are uncommonly deep.
The Swedish dub is not bad, except when Kiki’s ｢はーい｣ is translated as a relatively flat “Jaa”.
References here: “Don’t mention the war!”, Ghibli movie titles, “On Your Mark” (1995), “Fängslad” (2000), Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation (2001/2005), Spirited Away (2001), Someday’s Dreamers (2003), Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), Tales from Earthsea (2006), “Kitten Witch” (2016), Mary and the Witch’s Flower (2017), Earwig and the Witch (2020), Suzume (2022).
moving picture adaptation Ghibli animation Japanese production fiction
‣‣ “I Wanted to Show the Various Faces of One Person in This Film” (1989)
Miyazaki Hayao (interviewee).
Read in Starting Point.
At the same time, it was also my obstinate way of showing up those who say of my work, “All of the girls you focus on are princesses.”
An interview made for the Roman Album, on the significance of Ursula etc. In it, Miyazaki elaborates on a point raised in “Kiki — The Spirit and the Hopes of Contemporary Girls” (1988), that he spoke to his younger staff members about their economic situation.
References here: Starting Point: 1979–1996 (1996/2009).