Kiki's Delivery Service (1989)

 

When Kiki embarks on her first delivery, she flies as high as she can, so high that airplanes pass beneath her.  From Kiki's vantage point, we can see parts of Koriko City far from the center of town, however briefly.  There are a few large apartment buildings there whose architecture appears much more modern than Kiki's usual part of the city.  I've visited cities like this, with areas that preserve an old-fashioned appearance at the core and have more newfangled construction in surrounding areas.   

This is a film all about the old and the new.  The tradition Kiki participates in when she sets out on her own for a year of witch training is, we are told, an old one that has gone somewhat out of fashion.  Kiki's mother remarks that the roles of witches in general are changing.  One of the best sequences in the film involves Kiki taking an order from an elderly woman to deliver a pie to her grandddaughter.  When she stops by the woman's house, she finds that the pie isn't ready because the oven isn't working properly.  Kiki helps her use an old wood-burning oven instead.

When Kiki soars above Koriko, her cat Jiji asks her why went so high.  She explains that she did so to avoid the police.  They had stopped her on her first day in town when her confusion with how to navigate the roads led her to lose control of her flying.  Koriko City bustles with movement; though the roar of traffic is, to most of us, barely perceptible background noise, the way this film deploys it makes it rather jarring when we first hear it.  The biggest change for Kiki moving from her childhood home to Koriko is to be in a place so big and populous that movement must be regimented, and not every person is ready to befriend every other. 

When Kiki delivers the elderly woman's pie, she finds the granddaughter is ungrateful.  Later on, she discovers Tonbo—her first friend her age in Koriko—is friends with the granddaughter.  She reacts to this with dejection.  Soon afterward, she loses the ability to fly.  Witches fly with their "spirits," and her spirit had gotten low.  Some viewers react to this negatively, feeling that she overreacts; but Kiki is still a child, and what is at stake her is whether there will turn out to be any reason for her to stay in Koriko at all. 

And she gets over it quickly.  She befriends a painter who invites Kiki to her cabin in the woods.  At the cabin, Kiki witnesses the painter's most recent work: a large painting of enormous, ghostly figures of animals flying through the night toward the moon.  One of the apparitions is of a girl, and the painter tells Kiki that she was the inspiration.  Kiki is surprised by this, seeing no reason her image should be in a painting.  

But that's exactly the point.  Kiki fears she will lose everything if she loses her magic; she spends the film up to this point trying to figure out how to make herself valuable to Koriko as a witch.  But in the painting, she sees herself through another person's eyes, a person who needed nothing from her but simply found her interesting.  

Kiki has another, similar experience when the grandmother calls her again to deliver another gift.  It turns out the gift is for Kiki herself, a sign of the grandmother's appreciation not just for Kiki's service, but for spending time with her.  Kiki is kind and quick-thinking, and the adults who befriend her—Osono, the painter, and the grandmother—all value this; but they also value helping her for its own sake.  In the same way Kiki wants to be of service and receive approval, they want to help her see what is valuable about herself.  These characters come from all different stages of life; no one ever really outgrows the desire to be wanted.  They just form more mature opinions about what's important.

Again, Kiki's Delivery Service is a film about the old and the new, and part of that is how the ongoing ways people strive to be of service to each other bridge the old and new.  An old woman bakes for her loved ones; a painter makes new observations; and a flying witch transcends the winding, crowded roads of an old city to make deliveries.