Kiki's Delivery Service Review

Miyazaki takes Eiko Kadono's novel and removes almost everything a children's fantasy is supposed to have. There is no dark lord, no prophecy, and no final battle until a late set piece that Kiki solves by being useful rather than powerful. What is left is a film about a competent girl finding out that competence runs out. Kiki flies, so she starts a delivery business, and the movie is patient enough to show the unglamorous parts: the customers who are rude, the rain, the party she misses, the morning the broom simply will not lift.

The Ghibli craft is at its warmest here. Koriko is a European port city assembled out of Stockholm and Lisbon and drawn with enough working detail that a viewer believes people live there, and the flight animation finds real weight in a girl fighting a crosswind. Osono's bakery, Ursula's cabin in the woods, and the black cat who eventually stops talking all serve the same idea. The final rescue is the one concession to spectacle, and it is short. Everything before it is a small, exact, generous film about work.