Trust Your Spirit: What Makes Kiki's Delivery Service a Timeless Classic
Kiki’s Delivery Service tells a simple story that lacks the tight structure typical of director Hayao Miyazaki’s style. However, Kiki’s simplicity and genuine, heartful message about the shifting nature of what we enjoy is what makes this film a timeless masterpiece. // Image: Studio Ghibli, GKIDS
“Trust your spirit” - these are the words the Ursula tells the titular character of Kiki’s Delivery Service when she expresses her newfound difficulty doing the things that used to come naturally to her. Over the course of the 1989 animated film from Studio Ghibli, Kiki has proven that her witch powers are impressive yet unrefined. From the first few scenes of the movie expressing her lack of skill at flying on her broomstick to her eagerness to prove herself as a witch-in-training when she decides to leave her parents’ house, it’s instantly clear how much Kiki loves the freedom, wonder, and possibility that her witch powers promise. As she listens to her father’s radio as she flies through the air alongside her self-admitted best friend, Jiji, the audience is convinced of the adoration Kiki has for her life. With a bright attitude, a powerful support system in her family, and a boundless drive to improve her witch powers, Kiki is an infectiously likable protagonist that brings with her a profound spirit that illuminates the entirety of Kiki’s Delivery Service.
Shortly after departing on a quest to improve her abilities as a witch, Kiki finds herself in the seaside town of Koriko. This new setting for Kiki brings with it new opportunities for her to exhibit her spirit to the audience alongside the town’s residents. Her entrance is one where she flies over the populace. Her attempt at a graceful introduction to the townsfolk ends in chaos as she frantically scatters through the air, nearly colliding with vehicles and structures alike. Despite her ambitions of curating a refined image of herself, Kiki simply isn’t there yet. By nature, she’s clumsy, imperfect, and has lots to learn. She’s still full of insecurity of whether she’ll stay in Koriko and what she’ll do to make a living and train her skills. Despite her ambitions to train herself, Kiki doesn’t quite have a plan. As quickly as when Kiki sleeps on a train after finding herself in an unexpected rainstorm, the audience is taught that Kiki is the type of girl that acts first and thinks later.
Tombo, a boy that steals the attention of a police officer that questions Kiki after nearly causing a car accident, quickly takes a liking to Kiki. He pesters her with questions about being a witch and flying, all fallen on the ears of an annoyed Kiki that wants to be left alone. There’s a pompous prance in Kiki’s body language throughout this scene, highlighting that her spirit is one that’s as independent as it is short-tempered. She wants to prove herself and wants to be accepted by the town’s populace as the local witch, and yet she’s one that can’t be bothered to force a friendship with a boy that doesn’t match her personality type.
Shortly after, Kiki’s spirit guides her to her new vocation in this town. After overhearing Osono, a local bakery owner, call out to a woman that left behind her baby’s pacifier, Kiki unflinchingly offers to deliver it to the woman after seeking to use her powers to help people. This act is simple but selfless one - but tucked inside of it is a calling. As Kiki admits later on in the film, there’s not much that she’s good at besides flying. There isn’t much aside from her witch powers that she can provide to the world - and yet, that’s enough. With her clear love of flying and willingness to help people in need, Kiki has realized what her meaning in her newfound community can be. Through opening a delivery service that takes advantage of her aerial excursions, she’s able to find meaning in her community alongside finding an opportunity to grow as a witch trying to find her place in the world.
Like any kid discovering that they can turn what they love doing into a job, Kiki is overjoyed with her newfound living situation where she can use her witch abilities to make a living. This provides an immediate relatability and charm to Kiki as she aims to turn her unrefined passions and strengths into a career. For the first half of the film, it appears that Kiki’s Delivery Service is primarily focused on telling small-scale adventures of Kiki overcoming the challenges of running her business - and if the film had entirely committed to doing this, it would still likely be remembered as a cute, charming, and heartwarming coming-of-age movie. However, what elevates Kiki’s Delivery Service into joining the many Studio Ghibli movies that have become axiomatically timeless is its portrayal of how Kiki’s spirit transforms over time. Kiki stands out from other movies of its ilk because of its willingness to explore what happens to us when the relationships we have with our passions change over time. Kiki’s second half is profusely interested in examining Kiki’s subtle but palpable change as her hobby of flying becomes a means of survival.
Kiki initially brushes off Tombo’s advances to becoming her friend. Behind her instinctive veil of independence, Kiki ultimately pines to have friends and feel like she has a place in the world. Kiki’s Delivery Service humanizes the struggle of overcoming the faces we put on in front of others and accepting what we feel will make us happier and more fulfilled. // Image: Studio Ghibli, GKIDS
As Kiki embarks on the journey of her newfound vocation, we see immediate reminders of how much Kiki still has to learn. From crashing into a forest to dropping part of her delivery to going above and beyond for her clients just for the sake of helping them out as much as possible, Kiki’s work ethic is unrefined but determined - a combination that fuels the audience’s desire to want to see her improve and overcome the odds placed against her.
One pivotal aspect of Kiki’s quest towards understanding her vocation is when she meets Ursula, an artist living in a cabin in the forest where Kiki drops part of her delivery package. As Kiki gets to see more of Ursula’s cabin, it becomes increasingly clear that Ursula represents the possibility of holding onto one’s spirit and passion. We first see Ursula when she’s drawing the nearby crows on the roof of the cabin. As we see the inside of the cabin alongside Kiki, we see more and more of the work that Ursula has done over the years. She has clearly spent years refining her craft, resulting in art that she’s fully immersed herself with. Kiki is consistently impressed by the artwork that Ursula has produced. Indeed, Ursula is everything that Kiki strives to be - independent, self-sufficient, graceful, refined, and unapologetically herself. Ursula has turned her passion of art into something that fuels her life - she’s on the other end of the vocational journey that Kiki is on the first steps of.
As Kiki continues on her deliveries over the coming days, she remains determined to help her clients out as much as possible, though at her own detriment. Kiki helps an elderly woman cook a Herring and Pumpkin Pot Pie despite having previously made plans with Tombo to go to a party with him. Kiki dedicates herself to helping the woman cook the pie and deliver it to her granddaughter, which she does in spite of a thunderstorm that overtakes the town. Kiki ends up delivering the pie while drenched, causing her to miss her date with Tombo. The day after, Kiki gets sick - an embodiment of the cost of her ardor towards pleasing others.
Much like Kiki’s personality type, Jiji is initially an independent cat that is hesitant to welcome a friendship with a neighboring cat. Over time, though, he spends more and more time with the cat and less time with Kiki, gradually shifting their relationship with each other. Kiki and Jiji drift apart in some ways, with their tight friendship from the first half of the movie gradually fading away, though never completely. This is brought to its apex when Kiki stops understanding Jiji as he begins spewing meows towards Kiki instead of words.
What makes this plot thread particularly interesting is that it never gets resolved. In the film’s conclusion, Kiki uses her witch powers to save Tombo, implying that she regains full control of her witch powers, but her ability to understand Jiji never comes back. The audience is told that understanding black cats is part of the pantheon of witch powers - the fact that it never comes back (as far as the audience can tell) is emblematic of how our relationships and worldview changes as we mature. Despite his sarcastic and sometimes pessimistic comments towards her, it’s clear the Jiji and Kiki deeply care for one another and stick by each other no matter where life takes them. By the film’s end, their commitment to each other still exists, but it’s different now. They can’t have the back-and-forth conversations that they used to, and now Jiji has children to be responsible for. Their friendship still stands strong, but it’s crossed a point of no return as Kiki and Jiji’s lives have gone in different directions. This is an honest and believable representation of growing up, as Kiki has no choice but to come to terms with the fact that she may never have the camaraderie she once had with Jiji ever again. Life will be different - but as the film concludes, we see Kiki gradually accept that maybe that’s okay.
The circumstances of our lives change over time - it isn’t inherently a good or bad thing. It just is. It may be painful and hard to come to terms with, but that’s the direction life often takes as we get older - things change, and we need to adapt to our new reality and embrace whatever that change brings. Confronting this is a foundational building block of emotional maturity - something you don’t often see in animated films targeting a younger audience. The fact that Kiki’s Delivery Service is as willing as it is to discuss this theme so openly while also having the bravery to not tie everything in a neat bow, such as with the fact that Kiki doesn’t understand Jiji again, makes Kiki a profound film that’s able to be appreciated by kids and adults alike.
What makes Kiki’s Delivery Service such an authentic representation of the unclear journey that is becoming more emotionally intelligent and mature is that it shows Kiki’s struggle in a seemingly nonlinear fashion. As we seek to better ourselves, there are inevitably going to be parts of ourselves that are harder to address than others. Maybe you have stubbornness that you can never truly shake. Maybe you have an anxiety that builds when you’re around a lot of people that informs how you interact with groups of people. Maybe you just have a hard time deciding what parts of yourself you want to improve. To quote Sophie at the end of Howl’s Moving Castle, “a heart is a heavy burden” - embracing and confronting our humanity to improve ourselves is cosmically difficult, but it’s the decisions we make on how to improve ourselves, particularly when we feel at our lowest, that ultimately define who we are.
For Kiki, she gradually opens up to Tombo - her independent, standoff-ish personality has subsided a bit as she embraces the potential of friendship and a place to belong in Koriko. Despite beginning to struggle to fly herself, she rides with Tombo on his contraption that promises to fly through the air. The experiment is as dangerous as it is unsuccessful, but it still results in a hellacious release of laughs and joy from Kiki as they lay in the field amidst the scattered debris of Tombo’s bike-with-a-propeller-practically-duct-taped-onto-it. Kiki’s elation is refreshing to see after her struggle with people-pleasing and becoming sick as a result. It’s this moment that we finally get to see Kiki fully embrace what makes her happy. Like Jiji, the circumstances of Kiki’s life have started to change. She’s been consistently working throughout the film and has put her own health on the line for the benefit of others. Some of the drive, excitement, and optimism that we see in Kiki during the first half of the film has subsided, but in this moment, it all comes flooding back. Despite the change in her living situation, Kiki is still able to find joy and adventure in life, just as she could easily do when we were first introduced to her. It’s through the sheer joy that we see in Kiki’s expression that we’re reminded of something: this is Kiki’s spirit. This is who she is - a kind-hearted girl willing to go on adventures and help others (in this case, helping Tombo test out his flying contraption), and embracing the unknowns and possible dangers that may come alongside it. Her personhood and passion aren’t defined by her witch powers - rather, they’re defined by the way she expresses herself alone and around others.
But like with emotional maturity and embracing our own spirit, elation can quickly shift, and it does just that when Tombo gets confronted by his other friends to the annoyance of Kiki. She walks off and heads back home, to the confusion of Tombo before he goes back to see his friends. As Kiki returns to the attic she’s staying in, we see further evidence that Kiki’s losing her witch powers - something that convinces Kiki is losing a part of herself. She falls into a depression as she wonders what makes her her. A loneliness fills Kiki’s eyes as she doesn’t even see to fully understand why she’s against introducing herself to Tombo’s friends. Earlier in the film, we’ve seen Kiki walk through the streets of Koriko and look at groups of girls walking with each other. There’s an underlying pining to be more like other people - to have a group of people to belong with. This is something that Kiki’s never been able to achieve in her time at Koriko - but fixating on an inability to belong to a group of friends undermines what she has accomplished. She’s befriended so many different people. From Osono to Ursula to Tombo - Kiki has managed to find a network of people that admire her company. She has a place to belong, even if her brain is trying to convince her of the opposite.
What matters most to Kiki, though, is the fact that she can no longer seem to activate her witch powers at a whim. From no longer being able to communicate with Jiji and not being able to fly, Kiki is convinced that a large part of her identity has now eroded. It isn’t until she runs into Ursula in town that Kiki’s doubts finally get challenged and she’s able to fully reclaim who she is.
Kiki’s loss of her witch powers correlates to a change in her spirit. She doesn’t embrace her witch powers because she enjoys using them - her witch powers are now something she feels she has to do to have a place in the world. Kiki’s relationship with her witch powers change throughout the course of the film, much like how our own passions change as we enter adulthood and the workforce where we may or may not apply our hobbies and passions towards making a living. // Image: Studio Ghibli, GKIDS
Kiki’s reunion with Ursula is the pivotal turning point of Kiki’s emotional maturity and acceptance of her feelings and room for improvement. As discussed earlier, Ursula is a woman that is immersed in her work, fully embracing artistic expression to depict her view of the world around her. After Kiki and Ursula venture back to the cabin in the woods where they first met, Kiki begins modeling for a drawing by Ursula. During this session, Kiki confesses what we’ve come to know - that she’s losing her witch powers and doesn’t know if people will want to be around her as a result. Any viewer will be reminded of themselves at Kiki’s age as she unveils her insecurities to her friend - her concerns about not having a place in the world and her frustration to no longer do what she used to be passionate about are remarkably human conundrums that we often go through in adolescence.
In response, Ursula tells Kiki, “trust your spirit” - to not let her insecurities undermine everything that she’s accomplished and to allow herself to remember what she’s passionate about in the first place. Since the beginning of the film, Kiki has adored what her witch powers allow her to do. From flying through the sky and her back-and-forths with Jiji, she’s passionate about her capabilities as a witch. Ever since arriving in Koriko, witch abilities have become more than a passion for Kiki, they’ve become her livelihood. From her identity among the town’s populace to her ability to making a living, Kiki’s witch powers have gradually morphed from a passion to something that she needs to do to make a living. In actuality, though, the witch’s powers were never necessarily Kiki’s absolute passion. They weren’t the embodiment of her spirit. The witch powers have been a means to an end to accomplish what she truly loves doing - helping people and doing what she can to make others’ lives a bit better.
Kiki’s witch powers have ostensibly weakened - she loses the ability to talk with Jiji and she struggles to fly consistently, even in the film’s finale. But it’s through embracing her spirit of wanting to help others that Kiki finds the strength to muster some of her witch powers back. Maybe flying and utilizing her witch powers were a passion of Kiki’s for a time, but that passion has shifted. Maybe it’s for the best that Kiki no longer holds her witch powers on a pedestal to represent her identity and value to her new community. Rather, she should just let her newfound value of helping others exemplify her character. Kiki’s relationship with her witch powers have doubtlessly changed during her time in Koriko, but through that change, Kiki has become able to discover more about herself. She’s been able to learn more about what she values and truly enjoys doing. She understands herself more, even if that came at the detriment of realizing that her previous passion for her witch powers may not have the same value to her moving forward. That’s not to say that that previous passion has entirely disappeared, but it’s become something different - a means to facilitate other, more vital aspects of Kiki’s personality.
Coming to terms with this is difficult, but it’s something that’s vital to discovering one’s sense of self. Our interests and relationships with others change over the course of our life. When we have to begin making an independent living for ourselves, it’s natural and necessary for our priorities and values to shift as well. This is something we all begin experiencing at Kiki’s age, and it’s something we all continue to experience as we navigate adulthood.
As a writer, my relationship with writing as changed. In my childhood, it was purely a hobby I partook in to pass the time and explore my own creativity. I loved being creative and telling stories for the sake of it. But as I got older and realized that writing and creating stories was something that I wanted to do as a career, my relationship with writing naturally transformed and morphed into something else. As a man in his mid-to-late twenties that has a degree and many years of professional experience with multiple forms of writing, the very idea of communicating ideas and stories over the written word has shifted for me - and it will likely continue to shift. There are days where I despise writing and resent myself for choosing to go down this life path. There are days when I have to confront how hard it is to pursue this life path, both in terms of finding job opportunities and creating something that’s worth reading. Yet, there are also days where I’m fully confident and proud of myself for having the bravery to walk the path that I have. There are days when I’m reminded of the incredible opportunities I’ve gotten because of my writing and editing experience, including having to gotten to work on video game localization - something that has been my ultimate career ambition.
I ultimately love writing, but such a feeling is one that’s had many pushes and pulls over the years. Understanding my place in the world and my vocation has been a non-linear journey and one that will doubtlessly continue. Ever since I’ve given myself permission to trust my spirit and welcome the triumphs and struggles that will come alongside the path of pursuing my passion, I’ve found nothing but joy and strength to continue down the path I’ve walked. Over the years, I’ve become a better writer and I’ve done various different kinds of writing. In the years to come, I will likely continue to explore different avenues of writing and maybe finally end up exactly where I would professionally love to be. But until then, I need to trust my creative, writing-loving spirit. I need to embrace my current values and strengths as a writer while acknowledging that those values and strengths may shift over time. My relationship with writing has changed and will continue to change, and there’s nothing wrong with that. What won’t change is my spirit - my drive to tell meaningful stories that help inform and inspire people around the world. As long as I never stop trusting that spirit and that value, then I have full faith that I’ll never lose my way as a writer and as a creative.
Kiki’s Delivery Service is a brilliant reminder that, no matter how much the circumstances of our lives change and no matter how much our relationships change with others and the things that we’re passionate about - what never changes is the very essence of the person we choose to be. Our spirit represents the very energy we want to put into the world. For many of us, including Kiki herself, our spirit involves a drive to leave the world a better place than when we entered it. For Kiki, this takes the form of helping people through a delivery service while utilizing her unique witch powers that make her stand out from the rest of Koriko’s community. Vitally, the film invites all viewers to trust their own spirit, and find their own way to make the world a better place in a way that their spirit is uniquely equipped to do. For me, my creative spirit has equipped to make the world a better place through writing, telling stories, and inspiring creativity and critical thinking. Every viewer of Kiki’s Delivery Service will have their own takeaway of how trusting their spirit will guide them throughout their life.
This is precisely what makes Kiki’s Delivery Service a timeless classic. The theme of trusting your spirit to understand how you want to live your life is an idea that transcends age, gender, nationality, and walk of life. We all have a lot to learn from our spirit, but doing so isn’t an inherently easy thing to do. As Kiki’s Delivery Service demonstrates, it will involve pain and loneliness. It will involve moments where we question our own progress and whether we’re even on the right path. It will involve reconciling with the fact that aspects of our life will change and will never go back to the way they once were. Kiki chooses to push forward in spite of all of this - despite her weakened witch powers, she still saves Tombo in the film’s finale because she values her connections with others and her unique ability to help people. Kiki’s Delivery Service ends with an invitation to its viewers to do the same - to trudge through the hardships of the unknowns of life and where it will take us to prove the strength of our spirit. And when we embark on that journey of our spirit and trust where it will guide us, we become a stronger, happier, and more fulfilled version of ourselves.
And there’s nothing more timeless than that very journey. There’s nothing more timeless than the human ability to find the strength and fearlessness to prevail over the unknown. There’s nothing more timeless and more human than to find that strength and fearlessness through looking into ourselves and finding the spirit to guide us toward a better tomorrow.
Thank you very much for reading! What are your thoughts on Kiki’s Delivery Service? What do you think the film is trying to say about how our relationships with our passions change over time? As always, join the conversation and let me know what you think in the comments, on Bluesky @DerekExMachina, and on Twitter/X @DerekExMachina.
