Kiki’s Delivery Service and the Art of Growing Up

It’s definitively summertime where I live. The weather is swelteringly hot, the sun is bright enough that I have to pull the shades down on every window facing the front of the house, and the fireflies light up my backyard at night. All this indicates that it’s time to rewatch Kiki’s Delivery Service. Truth be told, this film isn’t actually one of my favourites, nor is it one that I go out of my way to watch every year. It’s certainly an amazingly gorgeous film but it wasn’t the first Ghibli movie that I watched when I was young, and I think that primacy is key to truly loving a piece of media. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. However, I’ve been finding myself thinking about Kiki’s Delivery Service a lot, especially as I transition further into my adult life. The movie holds a very poignant message about adulthood and the ways of being in the world, something that’s intriguing to me both as a professional qualifying therapist and as a person affected by the passage of time.

Kiki’s Delivery Service is about a 13-year-old witch, Kiki, who sets out from her rural countryside home, leaving her family and community behind to further develop her powers. This journey is supposedly a tradition amongst the magical community, with all 13-year-old witches leaving to find themselves. The only reminders of her community that Kiki takes with her is her mother’s old broomstick, her familiar, a black cat named Jiji, and her magical powers, primarily represented by her ability to fly. Kiki’s pilgrimage lands her in the coastal town of Koriko, and from there, the story is reminiscent of a country mouse finding their way in the city. Kiki establishes a delivery business with the local bakery (hence the name of the movie) and begins to learn who she is.

This journey, while not always directly analogous to real life, holds a universal human experience: growing out of childhood to become an adult. This process is quite often very scary. Whether it be a physical transition, like moving out of your childhood home to go to school, or a more abstract one, like drifting apart from old friends, there are consequences to change.

One of the earliest theories of adolescence was labelled Sturm und Drang, German for Storm and Stress. Those eponymous characteristics describe the turbulence that so often occurs during this period of intense change. While Hall, the psychologist that devised this theory, used this label in a very negative connotation, this turbulence is far from universal nor is it always damaging.

We see that within Kiki’s Delivery Service; no longer living with her parents, Kiki must find a new residence, and without her old friends and family around, she must form new relationships. Thought there are challenges within this process, but this period is ultimately successful. Kiki creates a solid business and a new community for herself.

However, what I love about Kiki’s Delivery service is that her journey isn’t that simple. It is not simply about her changing her external circumstances but also showing how this process interacts and causes her internal world to change as well.

Kiki is a child at the start of the movie. She’s passionate, energetic, whimsical, and utterly naïve about the world. She knows her place and is comfortable within it. Even with the initial leaving of her home, Kiki is excited. She is simply following the traditions set out for her. Yet even with her first flight outside of her traditional bubble, she is confronted with a challenge: Who does she want to be? She increases her awareness of the world, and in doing so, the world stares right back at her, challenging her to actively define her role in it. Kiki is no longer allowed to be a passive actor and instead must choose for herself who she becomes.

This process is the real struggle of the movie. The problem Kiki faces isn’t just the act of finding shelter, but answering who that shelter makes her? Who is she in relation to Osono and Fukuo, the bakers who she lives with? How does she want to react in the face of an annoying and ungrateful customer? Moreover, how does she even deal with confronting the passive negativities of the world; the burden of work, the despair of sacrifice without recognition, the recognition that you may not always be special and that in many ways, you are simply mundane?

Kiki especially deals with that last aspect. About halfway through the movie, Kiki begins to lose her witch powers. Her flying falters and she can no longer communicate with Jiji, only hearing him meow. There are many ways to interpret this phenomenon, and the movie even directly suggests it’s some form of artist’s block, a representation of Kiki losing passion and interest in her delivery service. While I understand this interpretation, I think this event represents even more. It is about Kiki moving on from childhood; it’s about her recognizing that she must choose a new identity and that she is the same as everyone else in that regard, that she can’t simply just passively follow along with some unspoken plan or tradition. It’s also her recognizing that maybe she’s not happy with what she chose currently and that it is her responsibility to either come to terms with that or change it.

This recognition of responsibility is a memetic hazard. Once you realize your responsibility, you can never truly put it away. We can’t return to childhood.

I think this idea is what’s so often scary about adulthood; the idea that it’s not only your environment changing around you, but that your inner self is being changed as well. When we’re children, we feel so stable. Every birthday, every holiday is a momentous occasion because it represents a big shift around us. But with each new experience that we add on, with each revolution around the sun, we add more and more possibility. Eventually that dam breaks, and we’re forced to choose. There is something that is profoundly sad about this experience. We mourn the loss of innocence that comes with being a child, we proclaim that youth is wasted on the young. But I don’t think that sentiment is true, nor do I think that sadness precludes happiness nor is it always bad.

Just as Hall’s Storm and Stress isn’t always universal or damaging, this experience of growing up doesn’t have to be only sad. Kiki concludes this herself; towards the end of the movie, she saves a friend from an airship accident and in doing so, regains her ability to fly. Despite this, Kiki doesn’t ever regain the ability to talk with Jiji. That particular aspect of her childhood is over. Yet, when she sends a letter back home, she says “It’s been hard sometimes, but I love this town”. Part of this response is that the hardship makes the successes better. Sadness allows us to cherish happiness. Another aspect is that she is choosing to accept the hardships of life, which in turn, makes her more comfortable. She is choosing to trust in herself and in her ability to choose her own path, even with hardship.

I am ten years old. The weather is swelteringly hot, the sun is bright enough that I have to pull the shades down on every window facing the front of the house, and the fireflies light up my backyard at night. The summer break stretches on into infinity and it is beautiful. I have no sense of who I am, and I am not actively exploring it. I am happy.

I am twenty-four years old. The weather is swelteringly hot, the sun is bright enough that I have to pull the shades down on every window facing the front of the house, and the fireflies light up my backyard at night. Summer break is no longer a concept for me. Summer is shorter each year. I am working and I must choose what I do with my days. The world is sometimes very difficult to be in. It is of course, still beautiful. I only have some sense of who I am, and each time I think I get a firm grasp, it slips out of my hands. I am frustrated and I am sad and that’s okay. I am happy too.