Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989)

directed by Hayao Miyazaki

Brad Efford

At the tail end of my senior year of college, when I received my last of six rejection letters from the creative writing programs I’d applied to, I smiled. At that point, it felt inevitable. I had no clue what came next. The plan had been to go to grad school, write some poems, teach eager college kids, live happily, etc. I had always thought and been reassured that if superpowers truly existed, mine involved putting words on the page. I didn’t have the stamina for stories, so when poetry started making sense to me, I veered into stanzas, hard. Wrote confident statements of intent, took the GRE in a sarcastic sort of way, convinced myself of the merits of my verse. Applied to good schools across the country and watched as week over week the dominos fell. Or didn’t—however the metaphor works. It was time to consider other options.

Kiki’s journey, of course, is not the same. Let’s count the ways:

1. She’s a little witch

2. She’s thirteen years old

3. She chooses to leave home and make a life for herself, leaving earlier than expected and with the sort of hunger that only comes with being a thirteen-year-old witch leaving home earlier than expected to find out what there is to do in the world

This is how things start for Kiki in Hayao Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service, a movie that if you’re a child is about a witch and her cute cat, and if you’re an adult is about the specific melancholy of figuring out what it is you might be any good for. Kiki leaves home with her cat Jiji, parallel in name and temperament, and settles on trying out pretty much the first town she comes across. It’s a beautiful seaside town, one of Miyazaki’s most enviable settings in a career full of enviable settings, and they don’t yet have a resident witch. Kiki finds herself befriended by a local baker, who lets her stay in the bakery’s attic suite rent-free. The baker finds Kiki charming in her clumsiness and earnest integrity. Kiki decides to start a delivery service, as she can use her broomstick to fly packages to and fro quicker than other services could offer, grasping the basic concept of a competitive advantage quickly and with unfettered joy. This, she thinks. This is what I will be good for. This is how I will make my way in the world. This is what I have to offer.

My journey, of course, was not the same. Poetry is not “something to offer,” and I never considered it as such. It was always a pathway to the classroom, to teaching writing workshops in the local coffee shop and holding office hours for bright-eyed so-and-so's onto whom I could shovel my favorite books in a cool, casual, aloof sort of professorly way.

Instead, after college, with no other eggs and now no baskets, I moved to Missoula, Montana. The university there had hired me to run a service learning program that hadn’t yet been funded, and then when the funding fell through in my third week on the job, the university kept me on to...do something undefined. I presented to students on local volunteer opportunities, went to city council meetings, planned a day-long symposium on giving back. In college, I had stumbled into volunteer organizing, coordinating service trips and fundraising events for my peers, and it felt like maybe this was my path now. My whole life I had thought of myself as a writer, but actually, now that I really thought about it, maybe that wasn’t it. Maybe I was this other sort of someone instead.

*

As the days pass for Kiki in the basic rhythms of her new life away from home, nothing really gets any easier—it turns out that life, the longer you live it, just keeps getting more. She goes grocery shopping for the first time and spends nearly all of her money (“We’ll just have to eat pancakes for a while,” she tells Jiji, feigning good humor). Her first official delivery goes awry almost immediately, a strong gust of wind sending her careening into a dense set of trees. She keeps coming across a crew of kids her own age who make her feel insecure, silly, freakish. She learns things about herself that don’t necessarily make her feel good about herself (“I think something’s wrong with me,” she muses at one point, maybe the movie’s most bleakly poignant. “I make friends, then suddenly I can’t bear to be with them. That other me, the cheerful and honest one, went away somewhere”). Eventually, it starts to feel like one good thing, any good thing, would be enough to turn the whole world around.

This is where Kiki’s Delivery Service—ostensibly a children’s movie about a good little witch in the big city—unveils itself as one of the most specifically humanist movies ever made.

*

When I arrived in Montana, I took a cab from the matchbox six-gate airport to my new house, a two-bedroom bungalow that had been fitted for five twentysomething roommates. Any room not specifically intended for cooking or taking a shower had more or less been converted into a bedroom. Rent was set at three hundred and fifty dollars a month. It was a Craigslist find, and would wind up being the greatest stroke of luck that website has ever wrought.

For most of the following year of my life, I lived with four women who spent just as much time in the woods clearing trails and chainsawing brush as they did playing house. There was wild rhubarb and a coop of chickens in the backyard, music streaming through each of the rooms, a snowshoe cat who perched on our shoulders like a parrot. I had a stipend, not technically a paycheck, two hundred dollars a month on my EBT card, and a shitty bike someone got for free from someone else they kind of sort of knew down the street. It was a better life than I ever could have imagined for myself, in so many ways, and yet.

*

Eventually, Kiki becomes so disenchanted by life—climaxing devastatingly when she gets herself sick soaring through sheets of cold rain just to deliver a homemade pie to a teenage girl who doesn’t want it and doesn’t recognize the work it took to get there—that she loses her ability to fly. It’s subtle at first, then immediate and total. She snaps her broomstick on one last test run, something personal snapping deep inside of her as well.

What’s so specific and human about this turn is that it has little to do with our protagonist coming up against “the real world,” or being forced to fit into its limits. Kiki meets an entire vibrant cast of wonderful people when she lands in her new home, and they delight in her being a witch just as much as they accept it as fine, fair, almost banal. Generally speaking, the world is not a cold, dark place. But Kiki is growing up. She has to learn to manage her own time. She has to run a business. She has to balance social obligations with work, and her moral compass is too strong for her to half-ass either. It’s too simple, all these stories we know of the hopeful go-getter being crushed by reality—what’s more true, and more ruinous, is that reality just keeps going, more and more and more, until it’s simply too much.

*

The year I spent in Montana, a life I think back on with such rich fondness and joy now—I wasn’t the right person to enjoy it in the moment. I was lonely, bored, uninventive, socially awkward, extremely disempowered in my work. I did a lot of shrugging and complaining about how much time I wasted at my computer doing nothing. I hung out with the same small group of people, people I loved dearly, friends who did their best (and in vain) to introduce me to so much in their worlds. Montana is so beautiful at every turn that it can take months for your eyes to adjust, I swear—Kiki, too, is struck speechless by her seaside town when she soars high enough above it all that it becomes a postcard, a painting, a perfect idea in abstract. The problem is that no matter where you go, you can’t get away from yourself.

*

At her lowest moment, Kiki’s new friend Ursula invites her to spend the night in Ursula’s cabin in the woods. Away from town and her personal disappointments, Kiki tells Ursula everything about how she’s feeling and what it’s doing to her. Ursula is a little older, living on her own in the middle of nowhere as a painter—she likens Kiki’s dilemma to artist’s block. “Painting and magical powers seem to be very similar,” she says. “Sometimes I can’t paint a thing.”

This anxiety, that you’ll lose the thing that gives you purpose (not the same as losing what makes you special), it seems so grown-up to me. Kids, after all, don’t have a purpose, at least not in the same way. They want to do whatever their brain tells them they like doing. Should I fly around, cast spells, talk to my talking cat, write poems? Kiki seems to have a breakthrough speaking with her new friend like this. Confidently—the first real sign of confidence we’ve seen from her in ages, it seems—she says, “I think I found what painting means, at least for me.”

“The spirit of witches. The spirit of artists. The spirit of bakers,” Ursula ponders, in the film’s defining line. “I suppose it must be a power given by God. Sometimes you suffer for it.”

*

Why is it that we always want to be better versions of the selves we think we already are? Kiki’s Delivery Service states this as an inevitability, really leans into it; I’m asking the question. I don’t know that I regret anything about my year in Montana—it taught me too much about myself, gave me the time to reapply to grad school and set my current life in motion—but I do recognize it was a special moment populated by precious people, and I might have missed much of that at the time.

Years later I went back to visit, and Missoula was the same. I proposed to my wife in the mountains. Together, we hiked the same trail I used to hike on my bluest nights, years earlier. My friends were still in town and I got to be a new self for them, which was really my only self, but older. Change was the only constant, even though some things never did. The spirit of witches. The spirit of artists. The spirit of mountains. The spirit of loneliness. The spirit of knowing, of growing, of becoming. I suppose they must be powers to suffer for. I suppose that’s something of the point. But that will never make it any easier.

Brad Efford is the founding editor of Wig-Wag and The RS 500. He lives in Northern California.