Hiroko Miyazaki

(On DVD, September 2019) Oh, what a lovely film. Kiki’s Delivery Service’s comforting, joyful tone starts early on as a thirteen-year-old girl, witch from birth, decides that now is the time to leave for her year away from home in learning how to become an adult. The departure is curiously drama-free (it’s clearly a film made for kids in that the occasion is portrayed as an adventure rather than an anxious white-knuckle event for her parents) and that sets the tone of a film without antagonists other that the protagonist’s own self-doubts. The pleasantness extends to the film’s redefinition of what it is to be a witch, keeping the flying broom and the black cat (hilariously snarky), but completely erasing any of the negative connotations of the term by western standards. Much of Kiki’s Delivery Service is a simple slice-of-life adventure in which nothing terrible happens, our protagonist discovering a few life lessons along the way and events reaching a spectacular conclusion when a gentle disaster threatens her new city. Hiroko Miyazaki’s touch has seldom been gentler than here—the character design of companion Jiji is particularly cute, even for an animal as overrepresented in fiction as a black cat. It’s a very different viewing experience, and a truly enjoyable one. Nearly everybody in the film is quite nice and it all feels like one big friendly hug.