Kiki's Delivery Service

Hayao Miyazaki did not set out to direct this. The job belonged to Sunao Katabuchi, who would have been making his first feature, and it was scoped as a 60 minute television special. Miyazaki wrote the draft, storyboarded it, then took the chair himself. Eiko Kadono’s novel is a run of unconnected small deliveries. The crow attack, the loss of Kiki’s powers and the airship crash were written for the screen. Kadono objected and production nearly stopped, resuming after producer Toshio Suzuki brought her to the studio. The seam shows: the first half still moves like a sequence of errands and the real crisis lands late. In the Japanese track Minami Takayama voices both Kiki and Ursula the painter, so the scene where Ursula diagnoses the creative block is the character talking to herself. Miyazaki has said Jiji stands for the childish part of Kiki, and that no longer understanding the cat marks her growing up; Jiji never speaks again. A co-producer is Yamato Transport, the courier firm owning the trademarked delivery word in the Japanese title. A good fit if you will stop waiting for plot and look at a town assembled from Miyazaki’s Stockholm and Visby photographs. Not for anyone who wants Jiji kept on as a wisecracking sidekick, since the film silences him deliberately.