Kiki's Delivery Service (1989) Movie Review

 
G  |  103 min

Genre: Animation | Adventure | Drama

Director & Writer: Hayao Miyazaki

Plot: A young witch, on her mandatory year of independent life, finds fitting into a new community difficult while she supports herself by running an air courier service.

This is one of the few Miyazaki movie that I never really interested me from seeing the trailers and posters for it. But after watching it for the first time, I have to say that it just might be on of my favorites films by him.

The movie follows Kiki as she is finally old enough to leave home and fly off to explore parts of the world and train more within a year. Right away she picks up the habit of delivering things to people around the city after refereeing to help everyone she ran into.

We get to see her character grow up and help people the best she can while she is on this journey and on the way she meets many new people who help her mature and half meaningful friendships with. 

In the movie there are only a small amount of actual character that are interacted with Kiki. But what makes them great are how they give a different dynamic with Kiki alongside be her friend as well.

The story in Kiki's delivery service is small and simple. Something different than I would expect from a Hayao Miyazaki film and just a film in this genre at all. But because the story is simple, its makes it easy to follow through the whole movie. Because there isn't any larger over arcing plot, it makes the world feel all the more realistic. 

I could easily re-watch the movie because of this. Its rare to see a movie that is so light and enjoyable and leaves you feeling good. The only real problem I had with the story is that it ended. I would actually really like to see Studio Ghibli revisit this world in a form of a TV show or something like that.

If you haven't seen Kiki's Delivery Service its definitely a movie worth checking out, it has memorable characters and is light enough to leave you enjoying the movie as a whole.

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