Movie Review: Kiki's Delivery Service
My submission to the ACX Review Contest
This was my submission to the 2025 ACX Everything-Except-Book Review Contest. After my horrifying review from 2024, I will only review happy cute things for the ACX Review Contest from now on.1
On a clear moonlit night, with her black cat Jiji and small radio in tow, 13-year-old Kiki sets off on her broomstick to make her way in the world.
According to tradition, witches her age are expected to leave home to complete their magical training in a new town. While the worldbuilding in this universe is intentionally vague, it’s established early on that a witch in training is supposed to specialize in a particular magical skill. Kiki’s mother specializes in potions, but Kiki, being a bit of an airhead, hasn’t decided yet.
When the storm clouds roll in halfway through her moonlit ride, she stows away in a boxcar to stay dry. She awakens in the morning to find that the train has carried her all the way south, to a city on the coast.2
Kiki grew up in the wild and magical northern countryside, and she has travelled south to (somewhat) modern civilization.
As she explores this beautiful, walkable, vaguely-northern-European city, she doesn’t get the warm welcome that she’d been expecting. Townspeople question who she is and demand to speak to her absent parents. A policeman chases her down after she flies into traffic. A hotel clerk rebuffs her request to stay for the night.
Lost and confused, she sets up by a water fountain in the park with her meager supplies, asking Jiji what they were going to do. Jiji, ever the practical one, simply admits that neither of them have much of a plan. Her first scary adult question emerges: “Where are we going to sleep tonight?”
After some further misadventures, Kiki ends up being taken in by a local bakery owner, Osono. Over hot chocolate, Osono explains that Kiki had received such a cold welcome at first because witches weren’t around in this city anymore. Nobody had seen a witch in decades; Osono had only ever heard stories. She offers her the room in the attic in exchange for helping out at the bakery. Kiki happily accepts.
Since there aren’t any witches nearby, Kiki still wonders what she’s going to do for her apprenticeship. Lacking interest in other types of magic, she realizes she really likes flying and starts a flying delivery service out of the bakery. She works as a cashier in the mornings and makes deliveries in the afternoons and evenings.
What follows are several eventful deliveries, trials, and tribulations—but she overcomes them and ends each day with happy customers.
What sets Kiki’s Delivery Service apart from other Studio Ghibli films like Spirited Away is that it’s a coming-of-age story grounded in real adult problems. Chihiro in Spirited Away emotionally “grows up” by fighting evil spirits, while Kiki grows up by, well, growing up. She starts a business to support herself, and it’s portrayed as this completely legible and straightforward task. Yes, running a delivery service has its challenges, but she overcomes them in a very mundane way.
She’s playing capitalism on easy mode, and it’s absolutely delightful and heartwarming. She finds a fantastic niche, news of her service spreads through word of mouth, and she’s surrounded by people who love her and support her in an incredibly safe and low-crime city. Even the bakery itself is quaint and cute; the business takes up the main floor of a mixed-used building where the family lives upstairs. This is the perfect embodiment of asabiyyah, a sense of civilizational belonging.
Osono and her husband have a spirit of camaraderie and community about them. She takes Kiki under her wing as a member of the family and gives her lots of business advice. They let her live up in the attic for free, with a hot breakfast every morning, in exchange for watching the cash register every day.
Don’t let the witch magic fool you—this movie is about growing up and becoming a functional adult. She faces some very adult fears: “Where am I going to sleep tonight? How will I pay the rent? How can I afford groceries? These supplies cost a lot of money. I gave the cashier my bills, and only got a tiny handful of pocket change back.” But then she overcomes them with minimal on-screen effort. She only needs to work an easy job to “pay” her rent, and her delivery business quickly starts making money hand over fist.
But under this veneer of successful adulting, Kiki is confronting feelings of intense alienation. Tombo, a local teen and flying machine aficionado, has been trying to befriend her this whole time, but the rest of his friend group treats her like an outsider. She’s the freak with a job who doesn’t go to school.
During her deliveries all over the city and surrounding countryside, it becomes clear that the modern era is slowly edging out the magical past. The bakery has an outhouse, but it’s fitted with a flush toilet.3
A customer’s fancy electric oven breaks, but the old wood-fired oven is still in the wall, in good enough condition to be used as backup. Kiki, having grown up in the north, knows how to properly light a fire in the oven, wait for it to burn down, and stoke the coals for baking at the right temperature.
There’s the ever-present question in the background: what happened to all the witches? Nobody had seen a witch in decades—to the point where an elderly character reminisces about her grandmother telling stories about witches from when she was young. That’s easily a 100-year gap between witness and storyteller.
But... why? Was there an in-universe version of the Salem Witch Trials? Surely these people knew that living, breathing witches were just a train ride away? Why act like they were all extinct?
Upon reflection, and going by the very limited worldbuilding, it seems like they were simply another piece of the past that got edged out by technology. Who needs witches on flying broomsticks when you have dirigibles? Who needs potions when you have modern medicine? The southern witches may have simply chosen to pack up and retreat to the north where they were still welcome. They became as obsolete as the wood-fired oven or the unplumbed outhouse.
As time goes on, Kiki encounters every trope about someone who makes their hobby into their job. Flying goes from being a fun pastime to being a slog. After a particularly upsetting delivery where she flies through the pouring rain, only to be greeted by a sneering teenager, she slinks home and falls ill with a fever.
Although she recovers from her fever, she struggles to keep it together. Tombo comes to visit her and they have a nice afternoon together. But when the rest of his friend group arrive in their car, Kiki notices that one of the members is the same surly teenager from that awful delivery. Kiki declines to hang out with them and goes home, still exhausted and sick.
The next morning, Jiji yowls at her instead of speaking. Panicking that something is wrong with her magic, she tries to fly, but her broomstick can’t lift her up. Getting desperate, she runs down a hill to take off, only to fall and break the broomstick underneath her.
It turns out that all those easily surmountable struggles were just the warm-up round for when she loses her ability to fly.
Unable to deliver packages from the air, she neglects her business. She still does her menial job at the bakery to stay afloat, but she sinks into a deep depression. She struggles to find purpose in her life.
But even in her darkest moment, she’s surrounded by the same people who love her. A hippy artist she met in the forest earlier comes to visit her at the bakery. They hitchhike back to her cabin, and the artist imparts all her wisdom about not fighting it when the creative juices aren’t flowing. She reassures Kiki that her magic will return when she needs it.
When Kiki get back to the city, the old woman with the broken stove bakes her a cake. Slowly but surely, she’s reconnecting with the magic she’s lost.
Then, Tombo gets into danger. He is swept away while clinging to a rope hanging from an out-of-control dirigible. He’s literally at the end of his rope, about to fall. Only someone on a flying broomstick can save him now!
Kiki’s adrenaline kicks in, she grabs a random broom from an onlooker, and her magic returns. She flies to the rescue and catches him in the nick of time. Roll credits.
In the time-skipped post-credit scene, she has regained her magic and is living happily as the Town Witch. She’s seen flying around next to Tombo’s new pedal-powered glider, and even Jiji finds love and has some kittens.
What is it that draws me so much to this movie? Kiki’s Delivery Service strikes at all my neoliberal sensibilities that “surviving under capitalism” should be this easy. Rent should be cheap. It should be simple to start a business and perform services for money. Life should be easily maintained by holding down a low-stakes job as a bakery cashier while your business takes off. Local merchants should be ordinary, honest people who extend a helping hand to lost witches. We should encourage our young people to leave the nest and make their way in the world.
But nowadays we don’t have that. Starting a business requires a mountain of paperwork, and those cute mixed-use buildings are illegal to build. The rent is too damn high, and so are groceries. And good luck asking for a favor from a local McDonald’s franchisee.
But whenever I put on this movie, I get to indulge in a teeny bit of wish fulfillment. We all wish we could have been more like Kiki.
Which is why I was surprised to learn that Miyazaki is a communist.
Wait, what?
Well... sort of. It’s complicated.
Miyazaki spent his early career at Toei Animation, where he served as the chief secretary of the employee’s union in the 1960s. When he moved on from Toei and began his directing career, Marxism heavily influenced his early work. This is most overtly shown in the 1978 television series Future Boy Conan. On a post-apocalyptic Earth, after the United States and Soviet Union have destroyed civilization with super-nukes, the titular character Conan must stop an evil warship named Industria from attempting to rebuild the world on the backs of an enslaved underclass.
His political views evolved over the next couple of decades. While Miyazaki called himself a Marxist in his youth, he later disavowed certain elements, notably while he was working on Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind from the mid-1980s through the ‘90s. This was the same time period when Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) came out. Much of his Studio Ghibli work is centered on “human industry versus nature” instead of class struggle. He could be better characterized as an environmentalist than a strict leftist.
Given this political subtext, there’s an obvious alternative way to interpret Kiki’s Delivery Service:
Magic is being steadily crowded out by modernity and industry. It used to be a sacred act for the Town Witch to offer up her services for free, but she now has to grovel and put up with rude customers in the context of running a business. Before, she would have been taken care of by the community and revered for her magical abilities. But when she first shows up in a modern city, she’s given the cold shoulder. Her very survival is dependent on her continuing to work and make deliveries, turning her sacred magic into a lowly commodity. Then, the grind of this makes her (almost) lose her magic entirely. It isn’t until she surrounds herself with people who care about her and learn to vibe with nature that her magic returns.
This is probably closer to what Miyazaki was going for.
When I first found out about this, I wasn’t really sure what to make of it. My instinct is to invoke Death of the Author and file this away with some other movies that had an obvious intended message and then, for whatever reason, ended up delivering a very different message. This wouldn’t be the first time when a movie from an Asian leftist doesn’t translate well to a Western audience.
So... which is it? Is the movie portraying business and commerce as good, or bad? Is trade a sacred pact of civilization, or is it a lowly magic-killing act of commodification?
Well, it’s up to you. There is no “correct” answer.
Just go watch the movie. It’s great.
This review has been edited from the version that I initially submitted to the contest. At the time, I wrote the final section while recovering from a concussion, so it was not my best work. I apologized for the mediocre quality to Scott in person at LessOnline. He chuckled, then said with a smile, “A concussion? Oh, that’s no excuse. Daniel Böttger wrote his review with a brain tumor.” Which… I can’t argue with that, I guess.
According to Miyazaki, Kiki’s city is based on the Swedish town of Visby, with bits of Stockholm mixed in.
At first I thought the flushing sound effect was added to tell the audience that Kiki had just used the bathroom, even though real outhouses don’t have flush toilets. But no, outhouses with plumbing were an actual thing for a brief period. The first “bathrooms” with plumbing were really just fancy outhouses.
This is a little like how the most beautifully pro-human character I know—made her the banner of my twitter [https://x.com/croissanthology]—is from a pro-environmentalism Mizayaki movie where humans are largely depicted as destructive forces whose industries generate evil ooze that corrupts the old guard of nature.
I'm sure the dude in that movie, Prince Forgettablecharacter, was meant to be the true hero, because he didn't unilaterally pick a "side" between the tribe of dumb and angry hogs, blood-soaked princess, dignified wolf and psychopathic god of death, and the tribe of corrupt men vying for materialistic power, tree-destroying sometimes-inhuman-industry-creating village that also happens to care for its lepers and prostitutes, and that this "middling" "compromise" "secret third thing" side is Mizayaki's stand-in.
That feels ridiculous to me—that instead, the true solution will not feel like "being in the middle of", but "simply correct", e.g. solarpunk as the "mix" of these two worlds which nonetheless stands on its own as just the human-CEV-intuitively-correct vision of the future [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solarpunk], [https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb9f7384e-36a5-4995-b36c-f32178db2386_1200x676.jpeg], which to be fair does *feel* like the ending of the movie.
But to me it's Lady Eboshi who seems to drive that actual change near the end, and not a standi-in whose position is so frail it becomes *forgettable*.
~Solarpunk as built by the pro-human character who no longer *must* put up with compromise (treating the red queen [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis] as her enemy, alas) but gets ~a post-malthusian world where whatever gets destroyed just comes back anyway, because that's how the nature god deer thingy Carlsmith-green [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gvNnE6Th594kfdB3z/on-green] works apparently.
That the Serious position isn't that one must compromise with reality or whatever, "grow up" and admit that "things aren't so simple as humans bad nature good" or "things aren't so simple as nature bad humans good", because the Serious position is meta-balance [https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/12/in-the-balance/], one meta level up over the squabbles Mizayaki might have thought he was confronting.
Eboshi feels to me like she understands this meta-balance where no other characters do. It's not like she takes *pleasure* in fighting nature with guns, and she simply smiles softly when a wolf god bites her arm off, because she respects her adversary-by-necessity and knows the price of protecting those she loves.
She's much fitter for a world where malthusian dynamics are more of a choice than "serious" people might think, those who speak of compromise at every step, "oh but solar panels take space", "oh but nuclear creates waste", as if these were a) meaningful effects versus "it's possible to create powerful and cheap enough solar panels" [https://croissanthology.substack.com/p/technology-gets-cheaper] or "we can dunk these on top of roofs to take less space" [https://croissanthology.com/motley#municipalpunk-future], rather than a sign of our current exceedingly poor circumstances and unfortunate situation here in the 21st century [https://croissanthology.com/situation], progress is rapid and b) a facet of an immutable law of the universe that you can't have your cake and eat it too.
But you can! I'm not sure how optimistic I am that gradual disempowerment will go well for us if we live in a timeline that won't succumb to x-risk first, but worlds where this does go well sure do look like "having our cake and eating it too", and it'll take quite a while before we reach malthusian dynamics again, if ever [https://open.substack.com/pub/lydianottingham/p/endogenous-automation-will-hit-you?utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=180532723], [https://archive.is/lZNss], [Contra https://www.cold-takes.com/more-on-multiple-world-size-economies-per-atom/].
And Eboshi seems to fit for that, and understands that, where Mononoke and Prince Whatshisname do not.
Wrote this because it feels to me to be another example of "Mizayaki makes a masterpiece that makes an extremely correct and beautiful point but it's not necessarily the one he was looking for", and because I love both Mononoke and Kiki. Thanks for this review! I needed something cute cozy and warm after the gradual disempowerment/omni-automation comment I wrote earlier today ^.