That sounds very dull, but by avoiding the supernatural and monsters, the story is much more easy to relate to. It is a story about leaving home and starting anew, meeting people, helping people, and have people help you when you get into trouble. It is very upbeat, even when things look bleak, they work out with a little help from friends. I liked Tombo's problems trying to be friends with Kiki because they seem like the problems people really have. One of the most beautiful scenes in the movie is Tombo silently waiting in the rain for Kiki who never shows up.
This movie is full of silent beauty. When the baker's wife invites Kiki to move in above the bakery, you get the impression that the gruff but silent husband does not care for Kiki. But in a later scene you see that he has baked a loaf of bread shaped like a girl riding a broom and mounted it in the bakery window.
Nothing is ever said about it, but you see how he appreciates her. I have both the dubbed and subtitled version of the movie. They are both great. This movie is one of the best dubbed I have seen. The dubbed version has a lighter, funnier tone because of the wise-cracking Jiji. I felt I could appreciate the animation better in the dubbed version because I did not have to focus on reading the subtitles. In general the voice acting in the dubbed version is excellent.
The subtitled version is also the letterbox version, so you get to see the full beauty of the animation. In some of the flying scenes, Jiji is humorously complaining about the flying conditions in the dubbed version, where the subtitled version lets you silently appreciate the beauty of flying. Due to licensing problems the dubbed and subtitled versions have different theme songs. I think both songs are great. I recommend getting both versions. Details Edit. Release date December 20, United States.
Disney's Official Site. Japanese English. Witch's Special Express Delivery. Box office Edit. Technical specs Edit. Runtime 1 hour 43 minutes. Dolby Stereo.
Related news. Sep 7 Slash Film. Aug 17 Den of Geek. Contribute to this page Suggest an edit or add missing content. Top Gap. See more gaps Learn more about contributing. Kiki eventually finds the perfect city to start her training in, an island town with a timeless European feel, crowded with people. She immediately gets in trouble with the authorities by almost causing an accident flying through the streets, and she proves to be socially awkward though determined to stick to her traditions and values and succeed in her training.
This involves starting her own business. She is almost immediately harassed by a boy named Tombo who is fascinated with aviation and therefore fascinated by her and her ability to fly. She also meets Osono at a local bakery, who offers Kiki in exchange for help at the shop.
She later meets Ursula, a fellow artist, from whom she can learn some wisdom. The rest of the film is about her struggling through her responsibilities and failures, and fighting against how they slowly begin to drain her, while finding her inspiration to keep going.
The faith of our fathers, the habits of our mothers, they will not always be ours after we leave father and mother, unless we consciously make it so.
Another thing we have to face is learning independence, how to take care of ourselves, feed ourselves, provide for ourselves, pay for the things we want. This is of course when other girls her age are walking around in neon clothing compared to her old, drab black dress , laughing, having fun, riding in automobiles and going wherever they like.
Kiki is stuck working for a living while spoiled brats are unthankful for their birthday gifts at their lavish parties one scene in particular. The contrast is unfair. But as our parents used to say: the world is unfair.
Still another, and perhaps the more precarious, is making our own friends. Developing our own social circle and maintaining it is one of the tough things about doing this whole adult thing. Consider that when we were younger, we had classmates as almost automatic friends that we saw everyday. We need our allies. Fitting in however is compounded by our sense of feeling different from everyone else.
Self-consciousness is the bane of fitting in. Quite the balancing act. Kiki may be a witch but her magic is raw and unrefined, if not downright unreliable. I think of a correlation with a metaphor used by the characters in Whisper of the Heart where the talent of a young writer is compared with a rock with gemstones in it which must be extracted from the rock and cut and polished through hard work and perseverance.
Kiki can fly on her broomstick but she never performs magic tricks or prestidigitation, making problems disappear. It just so happens to star a flying witch. Even with the addition of some obvious computer effects used sparingly, such as in the lake at the beginning of the film , the movie retains the standard Ghibli, high-quality, hand drawn animation style.
Studio Ghibli can capture some incredibly life-like movements and behaviors while at the same time animating humorous, more cartoonish moments. Also, the flight sequences are visual highlights of the film. Flying towards and away from the screen? With all of the flying in this film, there were many occasions to animate the ground moving quickly past Kiki on her broomstick.
It could not be helped, I suppose, and later Ghibli films reconcile this disparity. The city of Koriko which the young witch relocates to has a real-world aspect to it while retaining a fantastical charm about it. Miyazaki explained:. Apparently, the city was modeled after many real cities in various places across Europe, though primarily Visby and Stockholm in Sweden.
That explains the European style architecture and writing. It does not explain this:. Haleakala, Wailuku, Hana. Was Miyazaki thinking of Honolulu, Hawaii when he helped build this oceanside city? That statement may not be entirely fair as even non-action moments of stillness demand a great deal of talent to animate.
Jeff the dog. From the composer who wanted the music to be just as important as the images on screen comes a soundtrack uniquely befitting this kind of film: lighthearted, whimsical, catchy, and at moments either traditional or contemporary. Echoing the European visuals of the film is a recurring theme played by the violin.
Whenever the track starts it instantly swings the movie into the realm of emotion. In other moments pizzicato strings give the movie a sense of richness of culture.
There were several changes made to the audio of the film when Disney dubbed it, though these were cleared by Studio Ghibli like all other changes. The English soundtrack is more robust than the original Japanese and depending on the version your watching it may have different opening and closing songs. The original songs are the best and match the flavor of the film most closely, such as the one above.
On the way, she is blown off course by a gust of wind and accidentally drops the doll in a forest defended by angry crows. She has to humorously substitute her cat Jiji as the doll while she goes back to search for the doll. She encounters an artist named Ursula who lives by herself in the woods, who found the doll, and the two eventually become friends.
Kiki gets another job delivering a pie, except when she arrives to pick it up the old woman is having trouble with her modern oven.
Kiki helps build a fire in the old unused oven to bake the pie but ends up being caught in the rain on delivery and late for a rendezvous with Tombo, who had invited her to an aviation party. This leads to Kiki getting sick and losing her self-confidence and even a sense of her purpose, which snowballs into her losing her magical powers such as being able to communicate with Jiji and flying on her broomstick.
Thanks to the kindness of her friends and wisdom from the painter Ursula who tells her that she has to find inspiration and purpose herself just like an artist who is suffering from a blockage upon their art. Kiki finds inspiration when a dirigible, the Spirit of Freedom, is blown loose by powerful winds and flies un-piloted over the city with Tombo dangling from a rope beneath it.
Her own broomstick broken, she asks to borrow a broom from a chimney sweep and uses it in front of an adoring crowd to fly haphazardly up to Tombo and catch him just before he falls to his death. The ending credits sequence shows Kiki flying again. Original concept sketches for Kiki. Miyazaki was unhappy with the design, and drew the final, short-haired version. He kept the large ribbon as a symbol of her youth. Near the end of Totoro s production, members of Studio Ghibli were being recruited as senior staff for Kiki's Delivery Service.
Hiroshi Ohno, who would later work on projects such as Jin-Roh , was hired as art director at the request of Kazuo Oga. Miyazaki chose Sunao Katabuchi as director. Studio Ghibli hired Nobuyuki Isshiki as script writer, but Miyazaki was dissatisfied by the first draft, finding it dry and too divergent from his own vision of the film.
Their main stops were Stockholm and Visby at the Swedish island Gotland. Miyazaki began significantly modifying the story, creating new ideas and changing existing ones. Kadono's novel is more episodic, consisting of small stories about various people and incidents Kiki encounters while making deliveries.
Kiki overcomes many challenges in the novel based on "her good heart" and consequently expands her circle of friends. She faces no particular traumas or crises. Many of the more dramatic elements, such as Kiki losing her powers or the airship incident at the film's climax, are not present in the original story.
However, in order to more clearly illustrate the themes of struggling with independence and growing up in the film, Miyazaki intended to have Kiki face tougher challenges and create a more potent sense of loneliness. One such challenge is Kiki's sudden loss of ability to fly. This event is only loosely paralleled in the novel, in which Kiki's broom breaks and merely requires her to fix it. Miyazaki remarked, "As movies always create a more realistic feeling, Kiki will suffer stronger setbacks and loneliness than in the original".
Kadono was unhappy with the changes that made between the book and film, to the point that the project was in danger of being shelved at the screenplay stage. Miyazaki and Toshio Suzuki , the producer of Studio Ghibli, went to the author's home and invited her to the film's studio. After her visit to the studio, Kadono decided to let the project continue. Miyazaki finished the rough draft of the screenplay in June and presented it in July Sunao Katabuchi was scheduled to assume the director's chair, and would've been assisted by several directors at the will of the sponsoring companies.
These initial plans later fell through after Miyazaki revealed that he had decided to direct the film, because he had influenced the project so much. Katsuya Kondo and Shinji Otsuka were also greatly involved during production. Large crowd scenes during the latter half of the film proved challenging to animate.
The production faced numerous delays due to the large number of crowd scenes during the second half of the film, which placed a heavy burden on the staff and proved difficult to animate.
Isao Takahata took charge of the music production as Miyazaki's workload proved extremely taxing. Additional music work was given to composer Joe Hisaishi , who himself was busy with his own album production and busy schedule.
When planning the film's finale, Miyazaki described the accident with the dirigible as such, "If this incident occurred in the first half of the story the film could have easily revolved around it. Given how it occurs at the end, the dirigible had to be peripheral throughout the story so that the final scene wouldn't be completely out of the blue.
We also had to come up with various approaches like the television broadcast to make it seem more real. I didn't want to have a 'happily ever after' ending where she achieves success in her vocation or turns into a celerity. I really didn't want to make it a jobs-success story.
According to a pamphlet available during the film's release, the city where Kiki lives is called Koriko. The city depicted in the film freely interwove scenes and architecture from Stockholm and Gotland Island in Visby, Sweden, all of which were filmed by Ghibli staff during a research trip.
Miyazaki personally traveled to Ireland in , and additional imagery for the film were inspired by trips to San Francisco, Lisbon, the countryside of Paris and Naples. In the movie, a rescue firefighter's helmet read "Corico" instead of "Koriko". However, it is common for the letter c to be translated as k into many different languages. Miyazaki had previously visited Stockholm and Visby in while working for A-production the studio behind Lupin the 3rd during a research trip for the failed Pippi Longstocking project.
Miyazaki wanted to depict Europe had it not been through two major wars, thereby slowing the development of technology. Therefore, despite the film being set in the 80's, the use of black and white television, old vehicles and airships was still commonplace.
The company not only approved the use of its trademark, though its permission was not required under Japanese trademark laws, [12] The name of the bakery is a pun on panya Japanese for bakery, lit. Miyazaki often chose to depict Kiki in a melancholy state as he wanted to capture the challenges of young girls learning to grow up independently. It is the fifth Studio Ghibli film. It was the fourth theatrically released film from the studio, and was also the second feature film that Miyazaki directed but did not originally write himself.
The film won the Animage Anime Grand Prix prize in Kiki's Delivery Service is based on Eiko Kadono's novel of the same name, which is the first in a series originally published by Fukuinkan Shoten in The film adaptation includes only some of the episodes in the book; it ends at the end of summer while the book covers an entire calendar year. The movie depicts the gulf that exists between independence and reliance in the hopes and spirit of ordinary Japanese teenage girls.
It was released on home video in the U. This dub is only available in the Ghibli Laserdisc Box Set. Kirsten Dunst voiced Kiki in Disney 's English dub, released in This dub was also Canadian comedian and actor Phil Hartman 's last voice-acting performance as Jiji before his death in It was released to VHS on September 15, A few weeks later, Disney released another VHS of the movie, this time with the original Japanese soundtrack and with both English and Japanese subtitles.
A laserdisc version of the English dub also became available at this time. This version of this release was slightly edited to match the original Japanese version, removing some of Hartman's ad-libbed lines and replacing Sydney Forest's opening and ending songs with the original Japanese songs.
Two years later, on July 1, , StudioCanal released a Blu-ray, followed by a Grave of the Fireflies release except in that same format, only in the United Kingdom. Disney released Kiki's Delivery Service on blu-ray on November 18, Disney 's English dub of Kiki's Delivery Service contained some changes, which have been described as "pragmatic". There are a number of additions and embellishments to the film's musical score, and several lavish sound effects over sections that are silent in the Japanese original.
The extra pieces of music, composed by Paul Chihara, range from soft piano music to a string-plucked rendition of Edvard Griegmusical's In the Hall of the Mountain King. The original opening and ending theme songs were replaced by two new songs, Soaring and I'm Gonna Fly , written and performed for the English dub by Sydney Forest.
The depiction of the cat, Jiji, changed significantly in the Disney version. In Japanese culture, cats are usually depicted with feminine voices, whereas in American culture their voices are more gender-specific.
A number of Hartman's lines exist where Jiji simply says nothing in the original. Jiji's personality is notably different between the two versions, showing a more cynical and sarcastic attitude in the Disney English version as opposed to cautious and conscientious in the original Japanese.
In the original novel, familiarities like Jiji actually loses his ability to speak when their witch falls in love. Miyazaki ditched this in favor of various other story reasons. In the original Japanese script, Kiki loses her ability to communicate with Jiji permanently, but the American version adds a line that implies that she is once again able to understand him at the end of the film. More minor changes to appeal to the different teenage habits of the day include Kiki drinking hot chocolate instead of coffee and referring to "cute boys" instead of to "the disco".
However, as outlined in the Release notes section above, the English release is once again quite different; many elements have reverted more towards the original Japanese version. For example, Jiji once again does not talk at the very end, and many of the sound effects added to the "traditional" English version have been removed. The English subtitled script used for the original VHS subbed release and the later DVD release more closely adheres to the Japanese script, but still contains a few alterations.
Tokuma mistakenly believed the Streamline dub was an accurate translation of the film and offered it to Disney to use as subtitles. As a result, several additions from the dub appear in the subtitles regardless of whether or not they are present in the film. In Spain, Kiki was renamed "Nicky" because in Castilian language the phonetically similar "quiqui" is commonly used in the slang expression "echar un quiqui", which means "to have intercourse".
The film was re-titled Nicky la aprendiz de bruja. In , the film saw a re-release by Disney. This version featured less music and character dialogue, such as Kiki not being able to understand Jiji like in the Japanese original version. A manga book series using stills from the film was published in Japan by Tokuma Shoten.
In , a musical version of the story was produced. Yukio Ninagawa wrote the script and Kensuke Yokouchi directed the show. Akasaka was replaced by Katsuyuki Mori within the year. A cast recording was produced by the original cast, and the show was revived in and The film proved to be a financial success and was the highest-grossing film in Japan in This video release also sold over a million copies. On September 4, , Entertainment Weekly rated it as Video of the Year, and on September 12, , it was the first video release to be reviewed as a normal film on Siskel and Ebert rather than on the Video Pick of the Week section.
Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune and Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave it "two thumbs up" and Ebert went on to rank it as one of the best animated films of Other reviews were very positive as well. Calling for a boycott of The Walt Disney Company , the group said the company "is still not family friendly, but continues to have a darker agenda". As a result of the film's sponsorship and advertising efforts via TV commercials, the film sold roughly 2.
Cover art for the film's original soundtrack by Joe Hisaishi and Yumi Matsutoya. It featured re-orchestrated songs from the main soundtrack, and contained interviews and image boards from the movie. The recording session lasted from June to July It began immediately after Hisaishi, who had been to the United States for his solo album work, returned to Japan. Hisaishi wanted to recreate a distinctly European atmosphere featuring ethnic and dance-style songs using dulcimas a folk instruments that became the precursor to the piano , guitars, and accordions.
In an interview found in the liner notes of the Image Album, Hisaishi explained, "That's right. It's a fictional country, but it has a European atmosphere, so I thought about using so-called European ethnic groups, which are also dance-like.
As I said earlier, my schedule was tight this time, so Mr. Takahata helped me a lot. Normally, I also act as a music director myself. However, this time it was difficult in terms of time, so I had a meeting with Mr. Takahata and Mr. Miyazaki to make a plan for which scene to put the music in, and based on that, I was allowed to compose.
Of course, Mr. Takahata is also very familiar with music, so I'm relieved.
0コメント