Comfy, Cozy Cinema 2024 - Kiki's Delivery Service

I'm not a huge anime fan. My first experience with anime was "Heidi, Girl of the Alps" (Original: "Arupusu no shôjo Haiji), the 1974 series about the adventures of little Heidi after Johanna Spyri's books which first aired in German TV from 1977 to 1978. We were not used to this style of animation, especially the extreme display of emotions shown in the eyes and often huge mouths, and yet we were also kind of fascinated by it.
Somehow the style tends to overwhelm me at times and sometimes not at all. I didn't have a problem with Heidi which I'm quite sure I watched with my little brother, but I never got into Dragon Ball for example.
Only years later I watched a documentary about the worldwide Heidi phenomenon and learned from it, among other things, how much research the studio had put into this series. Included was, by the way, also Hayao Miyazaki, one of the Studio Ghibli founders ...

... which makes a nice bridge to the movie I want to talk about. Comfy Cozy Cinema 2024 is a collaboration of Lisa from Boondock Ramblings and Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs. They watch movies and talk about them and this week they chose "Kiki's Delivery Service" by Studio Ghibli.
Why don't you visit them to see what they think about it?

I know two versions, the anime movie from 1989 (Original: Majo no takkyûbin) and the live action movie from 2014. Actually, I had never seen all of the anime, but caught the live action version one sleepless night (which was the reason I watched it at all, I'm usually not a fan of live action remakes, either) which made me finally get the original.

I don't want to talk about production, direction, critiques, you can read up on that yourself. Here's just how I feel about the movie.
"Kiki's Delivery Service" is about independence, about finding your way in life, finding out about yourself and your skills, trying to overcome self-doubt and obstacles, and to adapt to new surroundings and new people, those that you click with right away, those you have to get to know closer before you like them, and those who don't like you or whom you don't like - sometimes for no reason at all.

Kiki is a young witch who follows the tradition of witches having to leave their home once they turn 13 and live independently in a town for one year.
The only magic power that Kiki has is being able to fly on a broom and she's not even perfect at it.
Nevertheless she's ready to fly into the unknown on her mother's broom, accompanied by her black cat Jiji, and ends up in the metropolis Koriko (which is a mixture of different cities in a 50s flair, actually Miyazaki travelled to Sweden for research and used a lot of it for Koriko).

Koriko doesn't necessarily receive Kiki with arms wide open, but there are people who welcome her, one of them being Osono who runs a bakery together with her husband and offers her the spare room to stay after Kiki helps bringing a customer something she forgot at the bakery.
This also gives her the idea to open a delivery service.

From there on, the movie is about Kiki meeting more new people who influence her life in some way or the other, Tombo, the neighbor, who is fascinated by all things flying including her, an old lady called Madame who is very nice to her, Ursula who lives in the woods and is an artist, but also the old lady's granddaughter who seems very rude and ungrateful to Kiki after she delivers a pie for her birthday which her grandmother and Kiki had put a lot of work into.

In fact, Kiki is quite easily annoyed with people which I think is absolutely normal for a teenager. She learns that you have to give people a chance before judging them and for example becomes friends with Tombo after she had rejected him at first, but it's not easy for her to do and causes such self-doubt in her that it even makes her lose her power.
Not only can't she understand Jiji anymore who has been like her alter ego, who has been just as easily annoyed as she - for example at the neighbor cat Lili - and has been the perfect conversation partner for her to bounce her thoughts, ideas, and doubts off, but she also loses her ability to fly which makes her doubt herself even more.

Kiki's spirits lift a little when Ursula invites her to her cabin for a sleepover and tells her there was a time when she had self-doubts as well, but that you can overcome them if you try hard and then the magic can happen again.
For Kiki, that moment comes when she sees the accident of an airship on TV which puts Tombo in mortal danger. She wants to help him so much that her flying power comes back, not easily, but just in time.

In the end, you see how Kiki has become a part of Koriko, flying with Tombo who perfected the "air bicycle" he built. She writes a letter home to tell her parents that the year will not be a problem for her because she's really happy in her town.

The most important question, however, is if she can understand Jiji again (you know, me and cats), but alas, she can't. It made me think of the Mary Poppins book in which the youngest babies understand the language of the animals and even of the sun, but then they grow older and suddenly it's gone because they have entered a new phase in life.
Kiki doesn't need Jiji anymore to talk to him and Jiji has made a life with Lili, but that doesn't mean they are not friends anymore.

The movie may seem a bit slow, maybe that was why I enjoyed it very much. There is no big action except for the rescue mission at the end, but in each scene something important happens, each one is a small step in the journey of Kiki growing up.
I also love the little details, like the way Kiki's dress is shoved up a bit and her shoes are off when she's cleaning Ursula's floor as exchange for Ursula helping her with an item from her first delivery or the way Kiki put clothespins on her wide sleeves, so they are not getting in the way when she helps Madame with preparing the old wood oven for the pie because the electric oven was broken (only one example for the mix of tradition and modern life, by the way, just like Kiki's traditional black witch dress combined with a big red hair bow).

I want to mention the live action movie as well, but much shorter as the message itself is the same.
I had the feeling they tried to make it a bit more modern, showing how Kiki interacts with some of the other girls or how she has to face more intolerance from some of the people because she's a witch.
For example, she's getting suspected of having hexed the beloved baby hippo in the zoo which made it lose its tail and get very sick. The rescue mission in this movie is taking the hippo to a professor living on an island despite a storm, so he can heal it (balancing the missing tail out with a watch ... what?). That story was really strange to me, not mentioning that the CGI hippo didn't look good.
There's no Ursula, but a singer, that part kind of worked, but wasn't really exciting, either.
Kiki herself was not as bad as some people seem to think, but for me she missed the sweetness of the anime Kiki and at first reminded me more of a young wannabe goth witch brat of modern times.
Tombo and his friends were a bit too slapstick for my taste, but they didn't take up that much of the movie.
Nevertheless, it was quite a fun movie for one sleepless night viewing and I think the message came still across.