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Kiki's Delivery Service
The 13 Aged Girl At The Seafront Town
Date:28, Feb, 2023
Investigated and Written by Misaka Youhei
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Kiki's Delivery Service. Of course, you cannot find it in this real world. That is the name of the 1989 Japanese animation film. And Kiki is the fictional female character who played the main role. The film was adapted from the 1985 novel written by Kadono Eiko. It was directed, written, produced by Miyazaki Hayao (1941-).

The story begins with the 13 aged girl named Kiki hearing the weather forecast by radio. It says it will be fine tonight. Listening to the forecast, she suddenly decides to go away tonight. Why? In fact, she is a descendant of the wizard family. According to their tradition, in the night with the full moon, the girl who decides to live on as a witch has to leave her home when she is 13 years old, and must live without her parents in unknown places for a year at least. Tonight the full moon will appear. Then Kiki rushes to leave her home tonight.

Leaving her home with saying goodbye to her families and neighbors, Kiki flies riding on her old broom with her beloved black cat named Jiji. After a while, she finds an unknown town facing the ocean. It looks very beautiful. Kiki falls in love with the place at the first sight, decides to live there. She flies to the urban area, but has nothing to do there. There's no one else who knows her, who has to take care about her life. All she can do is just flying with her broom. She gets at her wit's end, loses her confidence to live on there. And of course happens a miracle.

I suppose that Miyazaki Hayao tried to thoroughly describe the girls' growth in this animated film. You can see many kinds of women appear and act freshly there while watching the film. It looks like a showcase of woman. And he set the 13 years old girl at the center, tried to show the whole woman growth. So the male characters hardly became more impressive than the female. I guess so. It got a big hit as close to 2.64 million Japanese people went to theaters in 1989, as the distribution income was totally over 2.1 billion yen. That was the new record of Japanese animated films. Why did Kiki's Delivery Service get so popular? Let me suggest a possible answer. I believe that he all described the whole bildungsroman for women there, that outstretched the width of animation movies' spectators as a result.

about Kiki's Delivery Service

・Directed by Miyazaki Hayao
・Written by Miyazaki Hayao
・Basic Novel: Kadono Eiko
・Distributed by Toei
・Release: July 29, 1989
・Running Time: 102 min.





 

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