Trailer
Plot summary
Thirteen years old, Kiki sets out as witches must, to spend a year living independently. She carries her mother's old broom and her black cat, Jiji, who talks, and flies through the night searching for a town. She picks Koriko, a port city, where she tumbles through traffic and a policeman stops her until a boy named Tombo helps her get away. Wanting work, she comes to the Gutiokipanja bakery, kept by Osono, who is expecting a baby, and her husband Fukuo. Osono gives her the room upstairs, and Kiki begins making deliveries by broomstick. Her first errand is a stuffed black cat, a birthday present for a boy named Ket.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Kiki's Delivery Service (1989)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The novel's author, Eiko Kadono, was so unhappy with Hayao Miyazaki's changes that the project was in danger of being shelved at the screenplay stage; Miyazaki and producer Toshio Suzuki visited her home and invited her to the studio, after which she let it continue.
- The word takkyūbin in the Japanese title is a Yamato Transport trademark, and though the company sponsored the film it initially did not approve of its use, since Eiko Kadono had used it without permission; only the film's success restored relations with the company.
- Miyazaki did not originally travel to Sweden for research: he had already visited Visby and Stockholm while trying to secure the rights to an animated Pippi Longstocking, and after being denied a meeting with Astrid Lindgren he used photos from that trip to design the film's setting.
- Studio Ghibli hired Nobuyuki Isshiki as screenwriter, but Hayao Miyazaki found his first draft dry and too divergent from his own vision of the film.
- The Japanese opening and ending songs, Rūju no Dengon and Yasashisa ni Tsutsumareta Nara, were replaced in the 1997 Disney dub with two songs by Sydney Forest, which were themselves removed for the 2010 DVD release.
- Kiki's Delivery Service was the first Studio Ghibli film to be a success when it opened, and became one of the highest-grossing films in Japan in 1989.
- On September 12, 1998, the film's video release became the first to be reviewed as a normal film on Siskel and Ebert rather than in the show's "Video Pick of the Week" slot.
- Kiki's Delivery Service had a production budget of ¥800 million, making it, along with Akira and Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise, one of the most expensive anime films made up to that time.
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