Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1632 in DVD
• Released on: 2006-02-27
• Rating: Universal, suitable for all
• Formats: Animated, PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 104 minutes

Customer Reviews

lovely gentle film
This is one of the earliest from Miyazaki's famous Studio Ghibli, the greatest makers of Japanese hand-drawn anime films. Kiki is a thirteen-year-old witch, and daughter of a witch, who is eager to leave home and spend a year working away from home. Her only talent is flying on her broomstick, but she sets off with her black cat and finds a big city by the sea.
Cheerful, polite and innocent, Kiki needs her cat's sarcasm to make her way in the busy streets. She gets a job delivering presents for customers who visit the kind bakers who give her a home, but is shocked by the rudeness and spoilt behaviour of some, especially a girl her own age. A bespectacled boy on a bike becomes her friend, but Kiki undergoes a crisis of confidence in her own powers which results in her suddenly being unable to fly. Only when she looks within herself can she rescue her new friend after a zeppelin flight goes disastrously wrong....
All the Studio Ghibli trademarks which eventually featured in the masterpiece Spirited Away are here - rippling grasses, trains, weird buildings and pubescent heroines - but the story and psychology are much slighter. Characters have an irritating habit of suddenly breaking into wide cartoony laughter at odds with the charming gravity that is their habitual expression. My children preferred the sardonic cat to Kiki, and we all loathed her boyfriend. However, the beauty of the drawing and the attentiveness to small details such as a crumbling wall in a city alley make this worth having. Children of 5-8 will find it especailly enjoyable, as it is interesting but never frightening.

Wonderful
Kiki's Delivery Service is a beautiful gentle film, about love and friendship. I love it and so do my children (aged 6 and 3) who watch it again and again. It doesn't have the saccharine cliches of a disney film, or the surreal qualities of Howl's Moving Castle or Spirited Away, but it is a simple story of triumph over adversity that anyone of any age can relate to. Anyone who doesn't enjoy it has missed it's point completely. Like Chihiro, Kiki is a REAL hero for all ages.

Another beautiful film from Miyazaki
This is a lovely film about a young witch who has to go to a new town to make a name for herself. The depiction of the seaside town she ends up in is as fascinating as it is beautiful - it's in a Europe as seen through Japanese eyes. The animation is wonderful, with so many lovely little touches (in particular Jiji, Kiki's cat) and, unlike much of Miyazaki's work, the story focuses very much on the personal, rather than the epic and the mythical. It is also less dark than many Ghibli films, and is more clearly aimed at the younger end of the market. This is a sweet, tender and beautifully executed piece of anime which will appeal to all ages.