Kiki’s Delivery Service is a movie about growing up, which means it is also about what to do when things stop working. People understand and navigate the world through tradition, magic, technology, and art, but these practices will break down. Your electric stove stops working. Your paintings don’t come out right. Your broom won’t behave. Your dirigible crashes into your clock tower. These are the kind of failures all of us deal with every day as we try to fulfill our responsibilities toward others.
Plus, there will be times when you can’t turn to your family or friends for help, but have to face it on your own. Maybe your beloved granddaughter has turned into a snotty tween or your best friend has stopped talking to you. There will also be times you are doing something nobody around you understands. For instance: you might be a thirteen year old witch who is on her own for a year—because that’s how witches come of age—in a world where other thirteen year olds are dependent children.
That is Kiki’s situation, as she and her cat familiar Jiji try to make a life in the ambiguously European seaside town of Koriko. She’s left home with her dad’s radio, her mother’s broom, and the traditional black gown. At first, Kiki is intimidated by Koriko. Nobody there seems to know what a witch is. She almost causes a car accident and incurs the wrath of a policeman who wishes to speak to her parents. She can’t stay in hotels, since she’s a child. But as luck would have it she finds a place to stay in a bakery. She also finds a job to do: delivering things by broom.
And then Kiki’s off. She makes friends with Ursula, a cool artist who lives out in the woods named Ursula. She makes… let’s call it acquaintances… with a boy named Tombo who’s obsessed with flying and is trying to build a flying bicycle. We watch as Kiki keeps flying and running errands, getting better and better at it. And then, one day, she loses her magic. She can’t fly and she can’t talk to Jiji. Eventually Kiki regains her ability to fly. Her relationship with Jiji, however, is gone forever.
What’s the deal with that? That is what I would have asked when I was four—if I’d seen this movie when I was four. However, it’s never too late to ask. So, I repeat: What’s the deal with that?
It’s worth mentioning that Kiki’s Delivery Service is adapted from a book by Eiko Kadono and that in the book the entire final act of the movie does not happen.1 We are told that she will lose Jiji one day as a part of growing up and finding adult love:
When a witch has a baby girl, she searches for a black cat born around the same time and raises them together. As they grow, the cat and the girl learn to speak to each other in their own language. Kokiri used to have a cat named Mémé, and Kiki had one as well—a little black cat named Jiji.… Eventually the girl would grow up and find a new companion to take the place of her cat. The cat would also find its own partner and from then on, the pair would live separately.
But by the last page of the book, Kiki and Jiji are still chatting away. Their eventual parting seems years into the future. While Kadono eventually published more Kiki books, she hadn’t yet done so when the movie came out in 1989. In short, everything that happens in the final act of this movie is Miyazaki’s invention. Furthermore, Miyazaki removes the expectation that one day Kiki and Jiji will part. Instead, he severs their bond in a way that is sudden, upsetting, and irrevocable.2
The sequence of events that leads to Kiki’s loss of magic is as follows: after laboring heroically to help a woman make a pie for her granddaughter, flying through the pouring rain to deliver the pie on time, Kiki is shocked to discover the granddaughter does not care (and even resents the gift). Because she’s upset and has been out in the rain, she gets sick and stays in bed for a day.3 While Kiki is sick, Jiji begins to chat up another cat, Lily. Kiki feels better the next day, and can still talk to Jiji, but leaves him with Lily to make a delivery on foot. That delivery turns out to be for Tombo, and the two become friendlier, riding around on his bike (and then, crashing the bike)… until she realizes that one of Tombo’s friends is the spoiled granddaughter. Kiki leaves Tombo and walks home. When she gets back to her room and encounters Jiji again, she only hears meows.4 And, as she discovers a little later, she can no longer fly.
We might assume this loss of Jiji is centered around Tombo, as Kadono would have it work out in the book: Kiki replaces a fake boyfriend (Jiji) with a slightly less fake boyfriend (Tombo). But I don’t think that’s how it works in the movie. Kiki’s emotional problem is clearly about the other girl. On her day out with Tombo, she’s in a great mood right up until she sees this other girl. And, importantly, while Kiki has a strong reaction to the granddaughter, the girl herself is barely a character. We don’t get to know her and neither does Kiki. Her negative reaction is about something going on inside of her, not an external conflict with another person that she has to resolve.
We can put the granddaughter as a bookend to an earlier encounter Kiki has with a girl about he age. At the beginning of the movie, right after she’s left home, she meets another witch, who has almost completed her coming-of-age year. This witch is much more glamorous than Kiki and even a little aloof (Jiji thinks her cat is a snob). Unlike Kiki, who has only the basic talent all witches have (flying), she can tell fortunes. However, as Kiki and the other witch chat, the other girl warms up, and they part on friendly terms. She makes Kiki feel more childish because she’s how Kiki hopes to be at the other end of this process. As an aspirational figure, she makes Kiki first a little cowed and then a little inspired.
Once Kiki arrives in Koriko, her differences from the other girls her age are apparent, and she’s hostile to all the children her age. (Tombo probably asks for it.) She resents them for being able to spend their money on pretty clothes instead of food. While Kiki is self-reliant and works hard, in her delivery role she is still at heart a helpful daughter. She may happily trade insults with Tombo, a kid her own age, but she wants adult approval.5 Kiki would not, and probably could not, treat an adult gift with contempt. Even leaving home is about honoring tradition. The granddaughter6 has a kind of fake independence—money, nice clothes, makeup, a car—that is bound up with her lack of filial piety. Unlike the witch we meet at the beginning, Kiki does not exactly want to be this other girl. The granddaughter confronts Kiki with the ways in which she herself has yet to grow up because she is Kiki’s own inverted image, simultaneously more adult (sophisticated) than Kiki and more childish (dependent).
After leaving Tombo at the beach, Kiki tells Jiji: “I think something’s wrong with me. I make friends, then suddenly I can’t bear to be with them. That other me, the cheerful and honest one, went away somewhere.” At this point, though she doesn’t realize it, their connection has been severed. Up until now, Kiki’s second self and other half has been Jiji; her encounters with the granddaughter lead to Jiji being expelled from that position and Kiki seeing herself in an entirely negative light. In reaction to meeting this new other self, Kiki severs her ties to her parental home.7 She loses her magic, she loses Jiji, and she loses her mother’s broom.
The above is perhaps a long journey to the obvious conclusion, which is that Kiki loses her friend because she grows up. When she flies again, it is on a mission where it matters very much that she succeed—because if she fails, Tombo will die—and without the strength of her mother or the wit of Jiji to guide her. She loses her training wheels and she doesn’t get them back because… well, you never do get them back.8 However, I think the long journey is worth taking because what “growing up” means in this movie is not romance. Rather, it’s about finding a way one can stand both in tradition and for oneself. Jiji stays a part of Kiki’s life, but as a cat with a cat wife, a cat life, and kittens to care for.
In the period when Kiki cannot fly at all, she goes to stay with Ursula, the artist in the woods. Ursula comments that she once lost the ability to paint and realized it was because she only knew how to make paintings that were copying other people. Now, however, she paints with the understanding she may lose her footing at any time. She has developed coping mechanisms for blocks, but they will happen. That is the basic truth Kiki has to figure out: that things will fail and you have to cope. You can’t rely on things behaving like they should and you can’t force them either. You just have to be able to cope when they’re broken. And then you do that over, and over, and over.
There isn’t an Animation Obsessive about Kiki’s Delivery Service (that I see, at least) but there is one about one of its animators:
Mitski named Jiji one of “History’s Coolest Cats” in a recent interview: “This is why we as adult women should watch Kiki’s Delivery Service. [Kiki gets] burnt out and loses her magic. She can no longer speak to her familiar cat, Jiji, and this is devastating. I feel like this is exactly why Miyazaki stories are so good, because it’s so real. You can’t get your old childhood magic back. The only thing you can do is move forward and find new magic.”
Despite everything I said above I think it would be funny if Jiji lost the ability to talk simply because he got a cat wife. A kind of selkie situation. Kiki has nothing to do with it. It’s all Jiji’s drama. Loss of magic coincidental.
I think what actually bothers me most about Jiji is that he seems to lose his personality when he loses his voice. There are lots of comic bits involving him, like this one, but now he’s just a cat. It seems unjust.
One thing I like about this movie is that I have no sense of magic and technology as opposed. Kiki flies with her radio and she’s not offended by the idea of Tombo building a flying machine. In the book, magic is fading away, but in the movie Miyzaki communicates that witches are a minority group without implying they’re dying out.
When Kiki turns on the radio and “Rouge no Dengon” starts playing… that’s cinema…
Various people have made the “pumpkin and herring” pie and the consensus seems to be that it’s good? It’s too rich for me so I will take their word for it. I will admit my initial reaction was that sounds disgusting and when the granddaughter was a brat about it I was like she’s making some points here.
Apparently Miyazaki has said that Jiji is Kiki’s “other self” which—had I looked it up beforehand—could have saved me a certain amount of typing. Well… the typing’s done now….
Siskel and Ebert on Kiki:
Next up is Only Yesterday, which should be on the 28th.
Kadono apparently did not care for the movie. But, to be honest, it is superior to the book.
It’s also upsetting because it doesn’t seem like Jiji even experiences the loss—he becomes a normal cat.
When she’s lying ill in bed is, I think, the first time we, the audience, hear Jiji meow instead of speak.
Though she doesn’t notice this until later.
She can’t find a niche in Koriko until she has a stand-in mother.
anti-Kiki? Ikik?
Emotionally, what I think we feel with her through this process is something like this:
You are a child and I am an adult.
A child relies on her parents.
An adult relies on herself.
I am the opposite of you.
Therefore, I must rely on myself (reject my parents).
Jiji in fact warns her of that early in the movie: that once she starts, she can never go back.
This is my favorite Miyazaki movie. More than any movie I can think of, this one feels like there’s a world that exists that the characters inhabit, rather than a world created around characters. It seems endless and that there are infinite other stories in this world, but we’re focusing on this one.
Phil Hartman in the English language version is so great.
I don't know why I think it's so funny that the dog is named Jeff.