Woman of the Month: Kiki

Kiki from Kiki’s Delivery Service

You can always rely on Hayao Miyazaki for creating wonderful female protagonists. Nausicaä, Sheeta, Ponyo, Sophie, Chihiro, San, Satsuki and Mei – they’re all so different in design and personality, yet similar in one crucial way: they’re all fully-dimensional characters, and allowed to exist at the centre of their own narratives.

I recall an interview with Miyazaki somewhere or other in which he stated his deliberate intent to avoid the Distressed Damsel trope, as well as frequently steering away from overt romanticism between male and female characters. For a man with (what appears to be) unfettered creative control over his own projects, this is pretty remarkable, and I like to think that many of the complex female characters we enjoy today were in some way inspired by Miyazaki’s contributions to the zeitgeist.

Kiki is one of my favourite Miyazaki heroines, precisely because she’s so ordinary. This might be a strange thing to say about a witch who can fly and who leaves home at thirteen in order to set up her own business, but – in terms of the narrative – her magical abilities and early independence are almost a secondary consideration to her very grounded coming-of-age story.

In Kiki’s world, witches are required to leave their family home and find a new community to serve once they turn thirteen. Hoping to settle in a seaside town, Kiki leaves behind her parents and community and flies away on her broomstick with only Jiji the cat for companionship. She eventually ends up in the spare room of a friendly baker called Osono, tumbling to the idea of utilizing her flying abilities in order to start a delivery service.

It was around the late eighties/early nineties that a lot of child protagonists in film were characterized as miniature adults: precocious little brats who always had a snappy rejoinder (think Kevin from Home Alone or Susan from Miracle on 34th Street). Kiki existed in stark contrast to this smartarse approach – she’s polite, modest, responsible, hard-working, surprisingly humble, and shy.

She’s not without flaws, as the aforementioned shyness sometimes manifests as rudeness and immaturity. Like any gifted child, she’s more comfortable around adults than peers, so when Tombo first shows up, she has no idea how to react. Reverting to standoffishness, her verbal rebuffs are clearly down to the fact she simply doesn’t know how to respond to his attention.

Perhaps my favourite scene is when Kiki emerges on her first morning at the bakery, and sees Osono’s husband stretching in the backyard. He’s not doing anything overtly intimidating, but such is her self-consciousness that she hides until he leaves the area. It’s adorable, and a great setup for her impulsive hug when he later makes her a sign for her delivery service.

Kiki’s story is one of growing maturity and learning how to take care of herself (to quote Matilda: “something most people learn in their early thirties”) with a crisis period thrown in when her magical abilities unexpectedly begin to wane. Like someone struggling with writer’s block, Kiki has to take some time out and reconnect with who she is and what she wants before she can recover her innate power – a pretty unusual arc for a children’s film.

In fact, in the original Japanese dub she never regains her ability to communicate with Jiji, giving their relationship a “putting away childish things” turn when she finally grows out of her need for an animal companion.

Kiki’s Delivery Service is truly one of my favourite movies, and Kiki is a big part of the reason for that. Having read Eiko Kadono’s original book last month, I was able to better appreciate Miyazaki’s fidelity to the character as she was first conceived, while adding his own touches to how her story unfolds. Whenever I need a pick-me-up, or just a relaxing Saturday afternoon watch, I turn to Kiki.