Kiki’s Delivery Service: The Magic of Meaning and Believing

by Matthew Ajaj

March 9, 2024 

Originally released to Japanese audiences in 1989, Kiki’s Delivery Service would later make its way to English home media in the form of its 1998 Disney dub. This bewitching Studio Ghibli animated production depicts a kindhearted 13-year-old witch named Kiki, who leaves home alongside her talking cat Jiji on a journey to train her powers; she flies to a large town and is provided a room by a kindly baker, where she sets up her own delivery business. Although she is able to form friendships with a young flight fanatic, an isolated artist, and a kindly old woman, Kiki still faces various internal trials that culminate in a personal crisis that could spell the end of her witching ways for good.

Kiki’s Delivery Service did not need mesmerizing action spectacles, grand and perilous adventures, or even a villain to spellbind Japanese audiences and become the nation’s highest grossing film of 1989. It was a foundational film for rocketing the formerly fledgling (now widely-acclaimed) Studio Ghibli and their director Hayao Miyazaki into the stratosphere. Today, the film is considered to be one of the greatest anime movies of all-time. After watching it twice—the 2010 Disney re-dub and the original 1989 Japanese version—I was overcome by an invigorating, enriching energy that inspired me to better understand and improve myself. I think it is important to deconstruct and reflect on feelings like this in order to make them manifest in everyday life. 

[A strong gust of spoilers lies ahead—you should probably watch the movie first!]

Skimming the surface, it is easy to enjoy the film from a visual perspective given the beautiful majesty of its urban setting. Based on a Swedish metropolis, it has all the bustle of a city without much if any of the danger. People saunter the streets in an orderly manner, meshing and weaving without interruption. There are cars and crowds but also ample space to breathe where needed. Small shops like a bakery can afford a respectable piece of property and find modest success. A mother can push a stroller down an alley without a worry even at dusk. And of course there is also the gorgeous European architecture, surely a reflection of the admirable work and tasteful minds of the citizens it surrounds. It all accumulates into a pristine, idealistic picture of where any almost any person would want to live—perhaps even the most rural of folk.

But the delectable cherry on top of this superb city sundae is its adjacency to the ocean, offering plentiful commerce, yes, but moreso the ambiance—the tastes, smells, breezes, and sights of such natural wonder. Kiki’s midnight flight is guided by her desire to see the ocean, and she frequently admires the splendor of the sea throughout the film. The ocean is a symbol of the feminine ambition: it embodies the unknown and reflects beauty. It is woman who adds entropy to world by bearing children in her enigmatic womb and bringing them into existence, and although the deeps are laden with mystique, the surface shimmers in its ethereal effervescence and ebbs and flows like a graceful dance. Kiki longingly looks toward the ocean because of these symbolisms, as the ocean is akin to a fully realized, mature woman. One of the final credits scenes depicts a pajamas-adorning Kiki sitting on the roof and gazing at the ocean one more time with her back to the viewer, and given the circumstances of the ending and the positioning of the frame, this final shot of the ocean now serves as less so a source of her aspiration but a rather a reflection of the more mature young woman that she has become.

Allowing herself to be visible on the rooftop in her pajamas is a stark contrast to the Kiki the viewer had previously known throughout the film. Bright-eyed, courteous, and kind, Kiki is an easy character for the audience to cheer along. However, there is not a material enemy for which we root for her to overcome. Rather, her most stalwart opponent appears to be her own self-doubts. She frequently feels shame for her working status as an adolescent, and even moreso for her drab black garb that witches are traditionally meant to wear.

There are two critical scenes that serve as the impetus for Kiki’s personal crisis. The first catalyst is Tombo’s party conflicting with the pie delivery job. After all her work put into making the pie and helping the old madame with housework and traversing the dangerous rainstorm, Kiki arrives to deliver the pie to the granddaughter and faces a peer who could not stand in further contrast to her. The granddaughter is housed in a grand mansion and is celebrating a birthday party in evidently lavish style, adorning a fancy gown. Kiki, by comparison, is stuck working on dreary night and is dripping from head to toe in her simple black robe. Moreover, the granddaughter receives the pie with disgust and a complete lack of appreciation for all the work the kind madame and Kiki had put into it. This leaves Kiki completely devastated. She carries this anguish with her as she flies back to the bakery and decides not to attend the party with Tombo despite being so excited and driven to go just moments earlier. The reason she provides for her change of heart is that she cannot go in wet clothes, which is likely partially true, as seeing the granddaughter at a party in a lavish gown while all Kiki has is a drenched and drab black robe serves to further her feelings of unbelonging and unworthiness. But the missing component to her explanation is that her work has lost its meaning. Kiki’s delivery service is making some business, but this event signifies to Kiki that her work is not making any positive impact. When we lose meaning in our toils, we often lose meaning to our existence. It is likely that, at this juncture, Kiki feels unworthy to go to a party with her peers as a working girl whose work holds no worth.

The second scene, which directly precedes Kiki’s personal crisis, occurs a couple of days later. After a thrilling ride and crash-landing on Tombo’s flying prototype, Kiki and the young inventor have a laugh and have a conversation at the beach. Tombo is a highly unusual fellow; it’s not every day you meet a dorky flying-wannabe who wears nerdy glasses, a striped shirt, and jean capris (yikes) and yet is also brimming with confidence and has plenty of cool friends. He parallels Kiki in his proclivity for the skies, and shares in her unfortunate apparel situation, yet he diverges from her in his self-assuredness. This dynamic demonstrates that Kiki could have a healthy social life just like Tombo, as they are both working with the same ingredients, but it is her lack of self-acceptance and confidence that makes that an impossibility. While Tombo wishes that he could fly like a witch, Kiki bemoans that she does not find flying fun and instead feels more like a job, and she also directly states that she senses her confidence slipping away. Finally feeling in tandem with Tombo, things take a sudden turn when a car of adolescents (including the madame’s granddaughter) strolls by and calls Tombo over to go on the dirigible with them. He subsequently invites Kiki to join them; however, Kiki is immediately perturbed by this prospect and storms off. She had finally found a state of harmony at the beach with Tombo, but the introduction of other peers again raises her sense of inferiority, triggering her to put up her defenses and reject them. When Kiki gets home, she laments to Jiji—who is strangely silent at this point—that she feels like something is wrong with her and that her true self has disappeared. The very next day, Kiki realizes that she can no longer communicate with Jiji and that her ability to fly has been extinguished. Sapped of meaning in her work and belief in herself, this manifests in the dissipation of her powers. The message at play here is that we lose who we are when we do not find fulfillment in our duties and do not believe ourselves to be worthy of finding better.

Fortunately for Kiki, just a short time later her artist acquaintance, Ursula, stops by to see her and invites her back to her cabin in the woods. Ursula is a future foil to Kiki: like her, Ursula is a woman living out on her own to work on her craft. In contrast to Kiki’s bland and confining black robe, Ursula sports a brightly-colored and unrestrained outfit—a look that exudes a sense of freedom. In perhaps my favorite scene in the film, complemented by a hauntingly beautiful music piece, Kiki enters Ursula’s cabin and is awestruck by her new painting. The painting is based off of a real artwork; perhaps the furthest depths of its meaning escape me, but it exhibits the beauty and freedom of flight on a starry night. Just a few scenes earlier, Kiki had disclosed to Tombo that she finds her gift of flight to have become a chore; the painting stands in complete opposition to this idea. It depicts flight as having an ethereal elegance and a beautiful liberty, and fostering a sublime concordance between nature and humanity—specifically Kiki herself, who Ursula states inspired her idea for the painting and is depicted as the girl riding a winged horse. One element of the painting that struck me in particular was the girl’s peculiar ear and its placement adjacent to horse’s, as well as the girl’s eye and horse’s eye being strikingly similar—almost as if forming a singular body and resembling a “oneness” between nature and human. Interestingly, Ursula also comments here that Kiki’s face has grown prettier since they last met.

In their bedside conversation, in which Kiki strongly relates to Ursula’s past struggles with painting, Ursula speaks of the skills of witches, artists, and bakers being in one’s blood—God-given gifts in which one must pay in suffering to retroactively earn its bestowal and also maximize its potential. Altogether, Kiki’s stay with Ursula unlocked newfound confidence within her through Ursula’s admiration of her beauty and talent being worthy of inspiring the creation of such a magnificent painting; additionally, it cements Kiki’s flying abilities as having more worth than just a mere job and instead a wondrous gift that elicits admiration.

Following this, Kiki meets with the old madame again and is gifted an exquisite, sentimental cake to thank Kiki for all of her goodwill. Having previously been left crestfallen by the granddaughter’s disapproval of the pie, the madame’s act of loving gratitude in making her the personalized cake brings Kiki to joyful tears as she is relieved by the delayed satisfaction of feeling appreciated for her work. With this restored sense of meaning to her efforts in conjunction to the confidence she gained from her time with Ursula, Kiki now has everything she needs to rediscover her natural flying abilities—to rediscover herself. With Tombo in grave danger, Kiki grabs a street sweeper’s broom and successfully takes flight, saving her friend at the very last moment.

Kiki continues to fly on the street sweeper’s broom throughout the ending credits, becoming her flying apparatus of choice despite having made a new, traditional witch broom when she lost her witch powers. Earlier in the film, Kiki had not been so warmly received by some of the townsfolk, and she was especially perturbed by the police presence after she had caused the traffic incident. By making the street sweeper’s broom her own and cementing it as her new look with the delivery service sign that hanging outside her window in the end credits, it signifies her immersion with the town. It is a testament to the fundamental reality of growing up necessitating emergence from the cradle of one’s childhood home / parents and becoming a member of greater society.

While the film’s 1998 English dub is altogether satisfactory, its most controversial decision was to have Jiji talk again at the end—something that did not occur in the original Japanese version, and something that was corrected in the 2010 Disney re-dub. While it serves as a joyous moment for 1998 dub watchers, it undoubtedly undermines Kiki’s character arc. She and Jiji’s friendship remains strong without speech; she no longer requires his guiding voice, as she has matured significantly from her ordeals. Moreover, talking to a cat all day is not a path to fulfillment. That’s what crazy cat ladies do, and they are crazy for a reason: the relationship between human and pet, although one of many joys and cherishment, does not provide meaning. We find meaning—that long-term contentment that lets us wake up each morning with a smile, fall asleep feeling like our day’s work made a difference, and lay on our death bed with no regrets—through connecting with our fellow man. It means becoming a contributing member of society, uplifting others, and finding a spouse and bringing children into the world so they can continue the cycle. At the end of the movie, Jiji is a regular cat, a lovely companion, and that is all he needs to be now, as Kiki has gained human companions that she can talk to, learn from, and grow with.

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Kiki’s Delivery Service lovingly gifts its viewer with beautiful hand-drawn animation, wholesome scenes, and thought-invoking messages—two of which in particular stood out the most to me. Firstly, it depicts an interplay of self-doubt and self-acceptance, as the titular character experiences unworthiness and shame instigated from within herself, manifesting in the loss of her witch powers. In this way, one could say that self-doubt induces loss of self. Such thoughts of shame must be overcome with confidence: an acceptance for all that you are that cannot be helped, complemented by a drive to improve what can be helped and an assuredness that you are worthy of a good life. We have innate value as God’s creations, each instilled with our own abilities, and it is a prerequisite to believe in this value if we wish to actualize our abilities. Second, the movie emphasizes that work has meaning, and meaning is necessary to pursue. The namesake of the film is the protagonist’s business, and when her work is unappreciated she begins to feel like her work is meaningless and she subsequently becomes depressed. It demonstrates that there is a substantive essence to work, and that its true value is not derived from money but from the difference it makes. In our workplace which consumes so many hours of our daily lives, or at minimum in our other regular obligations such as duties to our family and our community, it is imperative to engage in work that allows us to make a positive change in the world so that we can maintain meaning in our lives every day. The first idea of overcoming self-doubt is an internal struggle, but the second idea of seeking meaning is an external one; we find fulfillment by interacting with broader society as we form relationships and uplift others. And these battles with self-doubt and finding meaning should not be fought alone. Like Ursula, we should help to bolster the confidence of those who are feeling down. Like the old madame, we should express gratitude for the work that others put in. Unlike Kiki, however, none of us have magical powers. But all the same, we must believe in ourselves to get off the ground and pursue meaning to fly forward.