In my desire to satisfy watching both a family-friendly movie and an anime movie this week, I've selected Hayao Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service. It's not a scary movie, unless you consider the perils of growing up scary, in which case the movie might scare you. It's a coming-of-age tale about a young witch named Kiki who alongside her cat Jiji flies away from home in accordance with witch customs. Like all things Miyazaki, the film is whimsical, and analysis of the film is in no shortage. Its strong female characters are effortlessly implemented and refreshing to watch, its flying metaphor for independence and belief in one's self is simple but moving, and its animation remarkably brings its world to life through the glorious views a only a child could imagine so brightly. In my quest to defend my choice of film for a Halloween countdown series and to try to create something original amongst an extremely crowded market of anime movie reviews, I am going to try to explain how the film creates something seemingly subjective viewer experiences through arguably more objective means. This is my treatise on vibes.
We don't get to see very much of witch society in the film, as it removes its heroine from her familiar setting as quick as possible to establish her contrast against modern society. What information we do glean from the brief time with her family and friends is a an abstraction of witchcraft based on popular images of witches in culture as well as a world of customs moving forward yet intermingling still with its past. Kiki's mother is an apothecary, yet her father seems like a typical salaryman; Kiki possesses a hand radio to tune-in to music and weather broadcasts, yet she is readily in-tune to witch sensibilities and customs as she decides to fly away from home that night; and Kiki's family tells of old witch customs being largely unfollowed in modernity, yet Kiki follows them on her own accord. The witch sensibilities she embodies are, perhaps even in her own universe, an aesthetic to aspire to instead of truly a societal role. The concept of the witch as explained in the movie is to wear black attire, ride on a broomstick, forge independence (with the accompaniment of a cat familiar) and strengthen a talent through said independence forging. The film, already drawing upon a novel's depiction of a witch, uses the idea of witches not to tell a history, a fictional history, or even an alternate history of them, but to reflect ideas and popular images of witches found amongst the general public's shared collective consciousness to, on one hand, create a metaphor for young girls' independence, but also to comfort the viewer with familiar images and iconography that abstract the tale of young girls' independence yet simultaneously modify the tale into something more palatable to more people and more grand to more people than its textual elements alone.
The image of our heroine Kiki. garbed in black with red bow, on broomstick with black cat, flying across oceanic vistas and over pastel washed cities evokes emotion not through concept alone, but through delivery. Animated film is a visual-led medium in which our mundane world can be extrapolated into a fantastic one, but instead of thinking of the film itself as the transformative element, or the act of watching the film as the transformative element, or perhaps it is the assortment of elements in the film's on-screen presentation that is truly bringing to magic to life. Some films carry with them an increased sense of nigh-indescribable splendor, and, not to discredit the incredible work of hundreds of people who worked on the movie, that sense is an independent construct of the elements that make up the film, as an example of something being greater than the sum of its parts. The primary recognizable component of this sense is, as is expected in an animated film, its appearance, and abstracted beyond the organization of ink, film cells, and pixels on the screen, its aesthetic. There are clues like drops in the ocean one can point to in Kiki's Delivery Service to explain this overwhelming aesthetic: Kiki's charming design that manages to contrast against itself (red bow against black dress), contrast her society (old fashioned against modern fashions, magic and witchcraft against science and technology), and contrast her development (simple and whimsical vs hardworking and internally conflicted); the kindness of the world around Kiki, full of characters who reject the cynicism of the big city, maternal figures who assist out of decency instead of role-fulfilling obligation, and few to no real antagonists; and animation quirks like wind effects rolling over characters when Kiki flies, Kiki's rocky flight paths, Jiji's silly cat moments, and countless other blink-and-you'll-miss-it moments. Any of those elements can explain why people like the film and still watch and talk about it 31 years after its release, but they only scratch the surface at explaining the overall effect the film has on a viewer.
I may have overexplained the film to the point it feels like I had a religious experience watching it, but in reality I thought it was a cute movie and wanted to wax poetically about the experience of any movie one likes. I said I wouldn't talk about the things I'm sure other reviewers have covered, yet my ideas managed to intersect with those as I considered the larger importance of the film's imagery in achieving its decades of positive reception. Kiki's Delivery Service, like all movies, knowingly takes things that we recognize, like the Halloween staple image of a witch, and transforms those things into ideas and images that have new meaning though they still resemble a thing we recognize (and perhaps because they still resemble a thing we recognize) now given an almost indescribable new ability to elicit emotional response. This overarching sentimentality which art brings about through appearance over substance is the essence of aesthetic, and I think this movie in particular embodies the concept.