JJKC 2 (1) pp.

21–34 Intellect Limited 2010

Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema

Volume 2 Number 1
© 2010 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jjkc.2.1.21_1

JONATHAN ELLIS
Sheffield University

The art of anime: Freeze-

frames and moving pictures
in Miyazaki Hayao’s Kiki’s
Delivery Service

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article analyses one of Miyazaki Hayao’s (1941–) most loved but least scruti- anime
nized anime films, Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989). In addition to placing the film Studio Ghibli
within the context of Miyazaki’s career, the article looks in particular at the ways in representations of
which the animation industry itself is one of the main subjects of the film. Attention family
is paid to intertextual references to earlier Miyazaki films such as My Neighbor Disney
Totoro (1988) as well as to Kiki’s relationship with other filmic and literary tradi- Bildungsroman
tions, specifically the Bildungsroman and Künstlerroman.

At first glance, Majo no Takkyu-bin/Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) is a typical

Miyazaki Hayao (1941–) film: the story of a young teenage girl who is forced
to learn something important not just about her self but also about the world
around her. Such are the broad outlines and narrative trajectory of nearly every
Miyazaki film, except his first, the James Bond-inspired caper Rupan Sansei:
Kariosutoro no Shiro/The Castle of Cagliostro (1979) and his latest, Gake no ue no
Ponyo/Ponyo (2008). Miyazaki has frequently been praised for placing female

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 Jonathan Ellis

1. Miyazaki’s fascination experience at the centre of his imaginative world. The gaze of his films is not
with flight originates
in autobiographical
on women as objects ‘to-be-looked-at’ (Mulvey 1989: 19) to cite Laura Mulvey’s
experiences. His famous formulation, but on women as artists and creators in their own right.
own father worked This is the case in nearly all of Miyazaki’s films, but explicitly so in Kiki’s Delivery
in a factory making
airplane parts during Service, in which the audience are presented with two female characters, both
World War II. See Mes of whom express and revise their artistry through other people. Kiki begins the
and Sharp film as a trainee witch whose only supernatural power is the ability to fly. In
(2005: 111–130).
order to be accepted by her chosen community, she has to develop other skills
like minding a shop and running errands for elderly people. In other words,
she has to make her gift for flying useful. Ursula’s existence is just as solitary
when Kiki first meets her. Her only friends are a crowd of crows who gather to
watch her paint. Yet in meeting Kiki, she is able to incorporate a more human
element into her work, and at the end of the film she paints a transfigured
Kiki onto the body of a mystical animal flying over the countryside. In a sense,
Miyazaki is performing a similar act of imaginative fusion in the film. He
takes something as commonplace as a teenager’s story of self-discovery and
lifts it beyond cliché and melodrama by incorporating other artistic and social
contexts, including the very art form of anime that brings Kiki’s and Ursula’s
stories to life. As Andrew Osmond has observed, Miyazaki’s animated scenes
often have ‘a bookish warmth’ (2008: 16). My reading of Kiki’s Delivery Service
is concerned with Miyazaki as a cinematic painter. I want to look behind the
film’s narrative to the freeze-frames and moving pictures that animate anime.
In what ways does Miyazaki, rather than Kiki, deliver the goods?
Miyazaki’s greatest gift to the animation industry has been his deter-
mination to keep animators drawing. What appears on the surface to be a
rather old-fashioned approach to film-making is at the same time quite revo-
lutionary in the context of the film industry’s current obsession with digital
technology. Most animation studios nowadays employ computer-generated
images to rub out the history of a character’s still-life past. Backgrounds and
foregrounds move with the characters in a way that simulates ‘reality’ in a
more complicated manner than previous animated films. While Miyazaki and
other Studio Ghibli directors employ some computer-generated imagery,
the majority of their films are still hand-drawn. They draw attention to the
artificiality of the anime world in a way that American films like Toy Story
(John Lasseter, 1995) or Finding Nemo (Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich,
2003) attempt to gloss over. This is most obvious in Miyazaki’s preoccupa-
tion with flight and images of flying.1
Most of his characters spend their animated lives above ground in a collec-
tion of aviation museum pieces, sci-fi ships and floating islands. As they fall
through space, manipulating its rules to pause gravity, the director seems to be
commenting on the art form of anime itself, or rather his interpretation of it.
At such moments, we see through the moving frames to their stationary birth
as still-life sketches. The reality veil dissolves and we enter a world of static
shadows. There is something both disturbing and marvellous about these
moments of revelation. It is as if the magic of anime (or any form of moving
image for that matter) is curiously explained and obscured. How are still-life
drawings kept in motion for so long? What rules of gravity do animators bend
to keep the human eye fooled? This is not the same as Quentin Tarantino’s
pastiche of Hong Kong cinema in his Kill Bill films (2003 and 2004). There,
the viewer is thrilled by the characters’ rule-bending antics without ever being
given time to contemplate the reasons behind them. It is as if gravity denial
were an implicit genre convention. In Miyazaki’s world, on the other hand,

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 The art of anime

characters need their brooms, scooters and other magic craft to remain in the
air. Their dependence on other objects to float or fly forces us to remember
their humanity and the human paintbrushes and pencils that put them there.
Miyazaki’s anime is a kindred form to the Renaissance cartoon. It displays
both the art of the human body in mastering time and space and the art of the
illustrator in copying it.
Kiki is a 13-year-old girl itching to leave home. Like many daughters of
talented parents, she looks up to her mother and father while at the same
time desperately wanting to outperform them. Kiki’s mother makes healing
potions on which the local village depends. Kiki, on the other hand, can do
little more than fly rather crookedly into a nearby forest while listening to
pop songs on her father’s radio. She thinks learning to be a witch is simply
about being able to fly better. Her parents know otherwise, but allow her to
make her own mistakes. Her companion during this journey is her sarcastic
cat, Jiji, a more than adequate surrogate for her parents’ advice. When they
leave home together, it is Jiji who frets about where they will stay and worries
about Kiki running out of money. Aside from being able to speak, he lacks all
other magical attributes often associated with a witch’s cat and appears far
happier eating pancakes or flirting with other cats on the roof. Jiji represents
the more cautious side of Kiki’s parents and perhaps also their capacity for
risk-taking and change. In the course of the film, he goes from being a child-
ish, somewhat timid cat (his habitual expression somewhere between a scowl
and a scream) to a protective father. Kiki’s own transformation is more or less
identical. Her teenage awkwardness in relation to boys, clothes and parties
is replaced by an ease about her own place in the world and what others
think of her. Kiki’s year abroad unsurprisingly forces her to re-examine her
former ways of thinking. She loses her ability to fly and only recovers it when
attempting to save somebody she cares for, an aviation-obsessed boy called
Tombo. In other words, Kiki has to develop selflessness in order to fly again.
She only becomes a witch – or, in the logic of the coming-of-age story, an
adult – when she loses everything that formerly identified her as a witch: the
ability to talk to Jiji, the gift of flight and even her mother’s broom.
Miyazaki has been famous for such stories for at least two decades. As
David Chute points out, ‘Almost always, the point-of-view characters in
Miyazaki’s films are young girls, extraordinarily gifted but plausibly awkward
kids, testing their powers in tentative interactions with the world’ (Chute
1988: 64). While this is certainly the case in Kiki, the film is rather more than
just another growing-into-adulthood narrative. Like other Miyazaki works,
it pays eloquent testimony to children’s books, comics and films from other
cultural traditions. The flight at the beginning of the film, for example, evokes
J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and Raymond Briggs’s The Snowman, while Kiki’s loss
of magical powers midway through the film is suggestive of any number of
superheroes who suddenly lose the otherworldly quality that previously set
them apart. In the majority of American films and particularly those adapted
from comics, superheroes either lose their powers through choice or another
(frequently evil) person’s active intervention. Superman becomes Clark Kent
through his own volition in Richard Lester’s Superman II (1980) in order to
devote his life to Lois Lane. Pixar wittily mock this trope of self-sacrifice
in their film The Incredibles (Brad Bird, 2004) where an entire family of
superheroes is forced to blend into small-town America in order not to make
‘normal’ Americans feel inferior. In Miyazaki’s case, however, Kiki loses her
gift for flying more or less overnight through nobody’s fault, least of all her

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 Jonathan Ellis

own. As Miyazaki’s son Goro has noted in a recent interview, his father
‘makes films with emotions rather than reasons’ (cited in Osmond 2008: 78).
Kiki’s inability to fly coincides not with any grand romantic or social gesture
as in the case of Superman II and The Incredibles – she is too young to make
a decision about the former and too much a teenager to know enough about
the latter – but simply with the passing of time. Talents have to be invested
in and worked at in Miyazaki’s cinematic world, even supernatural gifts like
flying. In grounding Kiki for a good third of the film and even breaking her
main superhero gadget (her witch’s broom), the director stresses the neces-
sity of hard work and practice in all spheres of life. He makes his superheroes
sweat to earn their keep and viewers in turn sweat to see whether they are
up to the task.
In such ways, Miyazaki makes Kiki’s journey emblematic of the stories of
other young people, particularly young artists. In interviews about the film,
the director relates Kiki’s situation in a new city to the dilemma facing young
Japanese men and women everywhere who leave the provinces behind to
seek fame and fortune in the metropolis. Every year, Miyazaki comments,
thousands of cartoonists come to Tokyo, yet only a hundred or so will ever
make a living there:

Today, there are said to be around 300,000 young men and women
who are hoping to make it as cartoonists. Being a cartoonist is not that
unusual a job. It is comparatively easy to get started and to make some
sort of living. But a characteristic of modern life is that once the needs
of daily life are taken care of, the real problem of self-realization begins
[…]. In Kiki’s life we see reflected the lives of so many young Japanese
girls today who are loved and supported economically by their parents,
but who long for the bright lights of the city, and are about to go there
and become independent.
(Miyazaki, cited in McCarthy 2002: 140–1)

As Miyazaki observes, there are clear parallels between Kiki’s situation as a

young witch trying to stand out in the city and the situation of thousands of
young artists desperate to make their names stand out as well. The economic
concerns of daily life can usually be dealt with; ‘the real problem [is] self-
realization’.
This dilemma is apparent within the first ten minutes of the film once Kiki
has left home. Her search to find a city to continue her training as a witch
quickly becomes a search to fit in to a new, far larger community. Kiki goes
from a small town in which she is the most famous teenager to a place where
almost everybody ignores her arrival, except an overly officious traffic police-
man who attempts to take her name down for riding her broom dangerously.
Miyazaki interestingly delays the opening credits until his young heroine is
airborne on her journey. It is almost as if the film proper only begins at this
stage. Yet the preamble to Kiki’s take-off reveals much about the family struc-
ture she has grown up in and the type of community she will look to recreate
elsewhere. As Miyazaki points out, Kiki, like many other young girls in Japan,
lacks nothing materially. Her bedroom is full of books and toys, an obvious
sign of her parents’ comfortable lifestyle and their physical care for her.
Miyazaki even gives himself a place in Kiki’s bedroom. Perched high on
a shelf is the Studio Ghibli logo in the shape of a stuffed Totoro. This is more
than just a cinema in-joke for Miyazaki fans. It is also a sly acknowledgement

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 The art of anime

of the extent to which Studio Ghibli’s labour-intensive productions depend

upon the marketing of related merchandise to support their animation
projects. Miyazaki has artistic freedom to make the type of films he chooses in
part because of the commercial success of tie-ins like the cuddly Totoro toys.
Just as Steven Spielberg makes a joke about the popularity of Jaws (1975) in
his own film E.T. (1982), Miyazaki also draws attention to the central role films
like Tonari no Totoro/My Neighbor Totoro (1988) have in the average Japanese
child’s life. As Helen McCarthy points out, ‘Totoro is the beloved companion
of millions of children in Japan. Stuffed toys ranging from pocked-sized to
giant are available in almost every major toy store’ (McCarthy 2002: 207). Kiki
thus represents the average teenager not just in her love of pop music and
shopping for shoes, but also in the fact that she has grown up with Miyazaki’s
films. In leaving her toy Totoro behind on the shelf, Kiki is leaving behind
her childhood self as well. It is as if Miyazaki is conscious of the accusations
of escapism levelled at his earlier films like Totoro, described by Susan Napier
as no more than a ‘nostalgic personal fantasy’ (Napier 2001: 475). From now
on, he seems to say, cuddly, magical animals will remain on the shelf. They
are part of a back catalogue he wishes children to remember as they grow
up, not to become a substitute for education and learning. Significantly, Kiki
takes with her a real cat, not a toy version. In a small way, Miyazaki is making
the audience aware of the role of anime in children’s lives and the particular
role of his anime in Japan. This artistry depends on material foundations he is
not embarrassed to draw right into the very background of his main charac-
ter’s home. It is an auteur-like reminder of the commercial boundaries within
which most directors still have to function.
Kiki’s home in the country is almost too idyllic. The film begins with a
panoramic view of the landscape as Kiki dozes in the grass listening to the
radio. Even a bee buzzing in her face seems a welcome friend. When Kiki
learns that the weather is clearing that night, allowing her to leave home, it
is as if even the rain clouds are making themselves scarce for the heroine’s
adventures. Miyazaki creates a pastoral paradise few children would actually
want to leave behind. It is worth noting in passing that hardly any Japanese
children would recognize this landscape nowadays given the overdevelop-
ment of huge swathes of Japanese countryside. Miyazaki has joked in the past
of looking forward to a time when Tokyo is submerged by the ocean and there
are no more skyscrapers. Kiki’s village and the city she travels to are alterna-
tive utopias for children of all nations, but especially so for Miyazaki’s home
audience. The fact that Kiki is determined to leave this kind of place behind
shows her curiosity about the outside world and also her desire to succeed.
She wants to prove herself in a more challenging environment. Nearly all
of Miyazaki’s heroines begin life in a similar kind of paradise. Nausicaä has
the Valley of Winds; Satsuki and Mei in Totoro a house in the country (albeit
one inhabited by dust bunnies); Fio Piccolo in Kurenai no Buta/Porco Rosso
(1992) her father’s matriarchal support network of aunts, sisters and cousins.
Yet each heroine has to leave these physical and psychological safe homes
of their pasts in order to define themselves as individuals distinct from the
generation that brought them up. Nausicaä’s empathy with the natural world
distances her from nearly every human being in the film. She fulfils an almost
messianic role in linking up the earth’s various biospheres with its numerous
races of people. Satsuki and Mei find a Lewis Carroll-like world underneath
the camphor tree that grows beside their house. The creatures they find there
are a reminder of the need to keep our fantasy lives intact and connected to

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the everyday world around us. The Totoro in the woods represents the imagi-
nary friend or lover every human being requires at some point. Fio is a female
designer who challenges the chauvinistic prejudices of men like Marco who
see women as little more than glamorous love objects. She is the working
woman that the future needs.
In Kiki’s case, her family surroundings are neither as treacherous as those
of Nausicaä (whose father is killed in the film’s opening moments) nor as
patriarchal as those of Fio (who has to persuade Marco to trust her). Yet
perhaps this lack of tension causes its own problems. Kiki has nothing to
struggle against. She begins the film as a bored teenager rather than a fully
working character, a static icon rather than a living human being. The film
begins at such a dreamlike pace because that is how Kiki sees her life and
seems to pass each day – in a kind of daydream waiting for the weather to
change. When it does, a welcome chaos ensues, for the animators and audi-
ence just as much as for the characters.
Kiki’s mother works at home in an enormous laboratory-cum-greenhouse,
preparing potions to treat elderly villagers. Her surprise at her daughter’s news
causes her to spoil the potion she is making. It explodes in a satisfying black
cloud (the only hint at this stage of any problems to come). As Kiki pushes
her clothes into her bag, her father returns home, the family car overburdened
with camping gear for a planned trip that weekend. He, too, is surprised at
the news, catching his foot on a piece of rope keeping the camping gear on
the roof. In a touching piece of symmetry with his wife’s exploding chemi-
cals, he is assaulted by falling camping equipment. But at least something is
beginning to happen. While Kiki’s father informs the rest of the family and
friends of her decision to leave that night, her mother dresses her in front of
the mirror. It is as if she remembers her own leave-taking at this point and
the moment of threshold it obviously represents in her daughter’s life. Her
father picks up on this theme when he comes to see Kiki himself when he
comments, ‘You look just like your mother when she was young’. He reas-
sures Kiki that she can always come home if things do not work out, to which
she replies by sticking her tongue out. Kiki is clearly loved and provided for
without question, but there is no narrative future for her or for the film in her
childhood bedroom. As she embraces her father, Hisaishi Joe’s music swells
to a sentimental climax that is meant, I think, to signal the end of Kiki’s child-
hood. She is about to be spirited away to a different, more uncertain future.
Miyazaki creates this emotional idyll in part as a kind of nostalgic recrea-
tion of Japanese family life. Few mothers work from home nowadays. Few
fathers return home early from work to take their daughters camping. Not
many children would be content distracting themselves with just a radio. It
is a lyric farewell to a style of family living that is no longer either practical or
popular with children or parents. Miyazaki’s anime, while in the vanguard of
storytelling in several ways, in particular his use of female protagonists, has
at its core a fairly old-fashioned regard for the family as the central institu-
tion of human life. That family can be made up of various adopted and even
non-human members, but family is where most of Miyazaki’s films begin and
end – on an image of community and self-sacrifice. Dani Cavallaro believes
that ‘the cultural distinctiveness of these principles in the context of Japan
should not be underestimated. Indeed, while some Western spectators may
view them merely as facets of a formal and fundamentally superficial notion
of etiquette, they are actually rooted in the traditional experience of belonging
to a world where one is never quite alone and where it is accordingly crucial

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 The art of anime

to learn how to interact constantly with others and to respect their places
within the group’ (2006: 83).
It is this ideological commitment to anti-individualism that most differ-
entiates the Studio Ghibli tradition of film-making from the Walt Disney
company with which it signed a distribution deal in 1996. Disney films
usually present individuals defining themselves against malevolent empires
or kingdoms in a way that reinstates certain myths of American individual-
ism and nation building. In Mulan (Tony Bancroft and Barry Cook, 1998) and
Hercules (Ron Clements and John Musker, 1997), for example, Disney ideol-
ogy absorbs Chinese and Greek mythology to make a distinctly American
story. Miyazaki, on the other hand, goes out of his way to resist such uniform
messages. He attempts to honour the other cultural traditions and source
materials from which he borrows, even when they seem alien to his home
Japanese audience. This is the case with Kiki too. While the film is adapted
from a Japanese book by Kadono Eiko, its depiction of family life may seem
fairly alien to most Japanese children (and perhaps also their parents). The
setting of the film is similarly otherworldly. The town Kiki travels to is based
on Stockholm, although there are elements of Naples and Paris and perhaps
also San Francisco in its idealized harbour and peaceful squares. According
to Miyazaki, the film is set in a 1950s Europe in which World War II never
happened, a world where children still dream of riding airships and where
parents seem content to let their children leave home at 13. Miyazaki creates
a utopian ideal for the cinema audience to live up to once they have left the
cinema. He is not suggesting all families should be constructed in a similar
way (or all cities for that matter). Even Kiki struggles to live up to this model
once she leaves home. But it is there as a positive image not just of how fami-
lies bring people together, but how art also creates communities and support
networks of emotionally rounded human beings. Kiki is ready to become a
witch once she leaves home because she already accepts her mother’s words
of advice that ‘what matters is the heart inside’. Disney films may have similar
lines of dialogue, but they do not display Miyazaki’s level of sustained philo-
sophical commitment.
Kiki’s problems begin as soon as she is airborne. She kicks off from the
ground riding her mother’s unfamiliar broom and almost immediately crashes
into a neighbouring forest that resounds to the sound of bells. The comment
of one of Kiki’s friends watching her – ‘I’m going to miss the wonderful sound
of those bells’ – suggests that Kiki’s flying is rarely very accurate, whichever
broom she is using. We are in the same position as her parents wondering
whether she will make it anywhere in one piece. Miyazaki calms our nerves
through a lovely use of music that has unfortunately been replaced in the
dubbed English-language version. Steadying herself on the broom, Kiki asks
Jiji to turn on the radio. In the original version of the film, she finds the pop
song ‘Rouge no Dengon’/‘Message in Rouge’ by the Japanese singer/song-
writer Yumi Arai. The song is written from the perspective of a girl board-
ing a train to see her boyfriend’s mother to complain about his behaviour
(she accuses him of being ‘a fickle lover’). The title refers to a message in
rouge that she has left on the bathroom mirror, informing him of her inten-
tions. Miyazaki employs this song of adult desertion as an ironic counter-
point to Kiki’s journey. She is carrying nothing like the emotional baggage of
the song’s singer. Despite the fact that she jokes about boys with Jiji shortly
before leaving home, sexual feelings are more or less absent from the film.
Even though Tombo seems to have a crush on her, Miyazaki stops the film

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 Jonathan Ellis

before the relationship can fully develop. That admitted, the opening song
does at the very least put Kiki’s problems in perspective. She has left home
voluntarily not to rebuke somebody else, but to find new experiences and
friends. In a sense, the rest of the film charts the dangers of Kiki becoming
too closely associated with the voice of the ‘Message in Rouge’. Instead of
bullying others to love her simply because of appearances (particularly her
appearance as a witch), Kiki has to make others like her for what lies inside.
The song expands on what her mother has just told her about the importance
of emotional integrity.
Before arriving at Kiki’s chosen destination by the sea, Miyazaki takes
two narrative detours. As the final bars of ‘Message in Rouge’ fade, Kiki
notices another young witch flying alongside her. In a brief conversation
during which we learn that the older girl has almost completed her train-
ing as a fortune-teller, Kiki’s self-confidence is completely shattered. The
older girl projects superiority almost entirely through dress and gesture.
She clearly knows how to perform the part of being a witch better than Kiki.
In fact, she appears more like a lady in a Henry James novel than a young
teenager on a broom. Whereas Kiki decorates herself with just a single red
ribbon in her hair, the other girl wears delicate heart-shaped gold earrings
and an elegant necklace. Whereas Kiki’s hair appears permanently unruly,
hers is perfectly shaped into two neat bunches. Whereas Kiki’s flying is
comically erratic, continually pitching herself or Jiji forwards, the other girl
sits erect on her broom as if using a lady’s riding saddle. Even the elder
girl’s cat adopts a regal position, eyes fixed ahead. Miyazaki gives us two
performances of witchhood – one old-fashioned signified by the older girl’s
lantern, one modern signified by Kiki’s radio – although there seems to be
no doubt in his mind that witchcraft is a uniquely female profession. No
mention is made of male wizards in the film, nor does Kiki depart from the
pattern of other Miyazaki films in its rigid presentation of idealistic, plucky
heroines in conflict with clumsy and ineffectual men. Kiki’s mastery of what
a witch looks like and how a witch behaves is thus intimately connected
with questions of gender and performance. The elder, more experienced girl
clearly knows her way around society. If she were a Jane Austen character,
she would have been in and about polite society on the search for a husband
for several months. Kiki, in contrast, is forced to play the part of the younger
sister or ingénue about to enter society but still learning its manners and
rules. When Kiki is packing her bag at the beginning of the film, Jiji advises
her of the importance of leaving home with ‘decorum and great dignity’. The
impression one makes in the world clearly matters.
The older girl acts condescendingly probably because Kiki has yet to learn
how to play a witch well. She lacks the clothes, the dignity and the poise. As
we watch the more elegant witch dive gracefully downwards, however, we
see the city she calls home: a Las Vegas-like town of gaudy lights and sound.
Jiji registers his own irritation at being patronized and blows a raspberry in
their direction. Miyazaki includes this encounter with another trainee witch to
show the kind of resentment, rivalry and perhaps even indifference that Kiki
will face in attempting to make a name for herself in the city. The point is not
that they are both witches, but that they are both young girls trying to define
themselves as different from each other. When Kiki is asked by the other girl,
‘What exactly is your skill?’, the fact that she does not have an answer ready is
extremely revealing. Kiki suddenly realizes that flying is not enough. She must
have other skills to stand out.

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 The art of anime

The second digression is typical of a Miyazaki film. As the weather takes

a turn for the worse, Kiki is forced to seek shelter in a stationary train. During
the night, the train begins its journey and we realize Kiki has actually gone
to sleep in a freight train full of friendly cows who, as Helen McCarthy wittily
observes, ‘don’t begrudge her a warm bed of hay’ (2002: 149). The scene is
played comically, from Jiji’s reluctance to sleep there in the first place to the
cows nibbling Kiki’s foot and wondering what they have found. Yet what are
a herd of cows doing in a freight train at night if not being taken to slaugh-
ter? Miyazaki does not dwell on this probable fact. In fact, he seems delib-
erately to avoid mentioning it. And yet the inevitability of death, not just of
the animals but of Kiki too, still lingers in the mind long after the scene has
finished. John Keats performs a comparable trick of imaginative description
in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. The ‘heifer lowing at the skies’, her ‘silken flanks
with garlands drest’ (Keats 1995: 216), is clearly companion to Miyazaki’s
freighted animals. In film and poem, animals are dressed for slaughter with-
out viewer or reader ever being told directly in so many images or words.
Mortality edges in without making much of a sound. The most obvious
connection between the cows’ journey and that of Kiki is the element of peril
both face, the cows at the hands of the slaughterer, Kiki before a town of
strangers. On another level, Miyazaki is slyly grounding his fantasy of flight
before it has even got off the ground. Moving pictures are given symbolic
deadweight. The audience has been given a reality check at the very outset
of the film. This should not surprise us too much, however. Death and illness
are ever-present features of Miyazaki’s work. His most purely escapist film,
Totoro, has at its centre an absent mother whose illness neither her husband
nor children really understand (an experience apparently based on Miyazaki’s
own childhood). One could see all of his films as in some sense a meditation
on mourning and the different forms grief takes. The central conceit of Porco
Rosso, for example, turns on a moment of threshold between life and death in
which Marco is miraculously saved from slaughter but has to watch all of his
friends ascend to heaven.
Kiki’s initial flight away from home is thus at every moment buffeted
and checked by emotional undercurrents, many of which relate to artistic
concerns about the importance of being true to one’s self and the dangers
of impersonating other people. There was clearly a personal issue at stake
for Miyazaki here too. In 1986, a heavily edited version of Nausicaä had been
released in the United States, much to Miyazaki’s annoyance. The experience
was so upsetting that he refused to sanction a single western release of any
of his films for the next decade. The future of Studio Ghibli itself was far from
certain at the time of Kiki’s release three years later in 1989. The merchandis-
ing potential of films like Totoro had yet to be fully exploited and the reputa-
tion of Miyazaki’s work abroad was nowhere near the level it is today. In
a very real sense, then, Kiki could have been one of the last Studio Ghibli
productions. This makes Miyazaki’s discussion of artistic vocation within the
film all the more daring and unusual. His drawings of Kiki, particularly when
she is in flight, seem to be deconstructing the very practice of animating char-
acters within an anime setting – deconstruction not in the sense of pulling the
entire fabric of the film apart, but in giving us a glimpse of the community of
artists delivering Kiki to us.
When Kiki leaves the freight train with Jiji, for example, taking flight from
a moving carriage, Miyazaki is able to display all the magic of anime in just
one or two frames. He has to deal with several spatial and temporal problems

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 Jonathan Ellis

at this point: distinguishing between Kiki’s and Jiji’s conversation against a

fast-moving landscape and how to get both of them off the train into the air
at a different speed from the carriage’s motion. The viewer is placed in the
same position as Kiki throughout the majority of this scene. Before taking off,
we share her wonder at the spectacular vista opening before us. Jiji, as else-
where in the film, plays the part of sourpuss literally. In response to Kiki’s
encouragement to look out, he describes the ocean as ‘just a puddle of water’.
Jiji gives the typical reply of the realist observer when looking at an artist’s
impression of a seascape. By downplaying the effects of Miyazaki’s drawing,
we seem to notice it even more. The ocean’s shimmering, simulated beauty
is heightened. The view from the train looks like a Henri Matisse painting
in motion, the blues and greens shifting subtly in line with the tide, as if we
were passing through an art gallery on roller skates. Miyazaki introduces
these virtuoso moments of colour, light and movement with little warning,
almost as if they were worth hardly anything in the film. Yet perhaps this is
the point. We are being given something for nothing. Anime distinguishes
itself from other forms of animation in the care lavished on a background
that seems to have no relation to the main narrative – to be little more than
an artistic digression. It is arguably in these digressions that Miyazaki’s films
stand out. His concern for the ‘puddle of water’ that Jiji dismisses is a mark
of his concern for the many other literal and metaphorical backwaters that
many other directors (both of anime and other film genres) ignore. When
critics discuss Miyazaki’s environmental conscience, evident in films like Kaze
no Tani no Naushika/Nausicaä (1984) and Mononoke Hime/Princess Mononoke
(1997), they sometimes miss the time he actually spends painting nature. He
wants artists to be in awe of nature and, in turn, make others in awe of their
subsequent impressions of this natural world.
Miyazaki’s real coup de grâce, however, is the moment Kiki leaves the train.
As she lays the broom on the roof of the carriage, preparing to lift off, the direc-
tor contrasts her and Jiji’s preparations with the passing landscape. For a brief
second or two, Kiki hardly moves. In dramatic terms, this is psychologically
convincing. Who, aside from a character in a film, ever wants to jump from a
moving train willingly? In terms of the film’s commentary on itself, the pause
has another significance. It is as if the animators had purposely forgotten to
adjust Kiki’s posture for a frame or two. While the background slides behind
her, Kiki’s figure is almost motionless. In an article on Miyazaki’s employment
of images of floating and weightlessness in Tenku- no Shiro Raputa/Castle in
the Sky (1986), Thomas Lamarre connects Sheeta’s sense of ‘freedom within
her world’ with the type of imaginative freedom possible in anime (Lamarre
2002: 348). As Lamarre points out, ‘this is a story in which an animated char-
acter realizes the weightlessness constituent of animated characters. In other
words, her floating is also an expression of a potential within anime’ (2002:
348). The same kind of double realization is in play in Kiki. We see both the
courage of a young girl preparing to jump from a fast-moving object and the
skill of Miyazaki in putting her there. The moment of delay, the slightest of
hesitations, shows us the real effort of animating static drawings.
Most anime, like most films, usually attempt to hide this stasis. Yet
Miyazaki delights in the exposure of it. When Kiki appears to be losing her
gift for flying, for example, she tries to recapture it by running down a hill.
Yet every time she lets her feet go, she comes quickly back down to earth.
Her increasing desperation is one of the few real notes of panic in the film,
highlighted by Miyazaki’s decision to locate it at night-time next to a busy

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road. At one point, Kiki looks over her shoulder at the passing cars above her.
Her gaze at the road neatly summarizes her sense of anguish at her own loss
of motion. There is of course a subtle contrast being drawn here between the
manufactured modern speed of the car and Kiki’s very personal, mysterious
gift for flight. Miyazaki clearly prefers the beauty of handcrafted flight and
motion for Kiki as a person and Kiki as a film. What, though, do we gain
from watching anime that suddenly become unanimated, as if questioning
the very meaning of the name? These moments of dead time exist in part, as I
have already argued, as a reminder of the difficulty of lifting still drawings into
life. They speak of the origins of anime in books of drawings that one flicks
through at speed to create the sensation of movement. On a more philosophi-
cal or spiritual level – and this again is not out of character with Miyazaki’s
other films – moments of dead time may also be moments about death: the
ultimate freeze-frame of human movement.
Jiji only leaps onto the broom at the very last minute, notching up the
level of drama a little more. When Kiki is still on the train, we watch her
as if on the carriage ourselves. She looks left as the landscape passes by her
the other way. As she jumps out of the frame, disappearing into the right-
hand corner, Miyazaki then cuts to an image of her spinning away in a blur
of purple and red. The direction she is travelling in is now reversed. Kiki and
Jiji look to the right of the frame before quickly vanishing. The perspective
Miyazaki shows us is still train-bound. Kiki and Jiji escape behind our field
of vision and we have to spin round to catch a glimpse of them before they
disappear. In addition to negotiating this awkward departure through space
and time, the animators have also introduced an element of surprise: our
surprise at being caught unawares. As I stated at the beginning of this article,
Miyazaki resists the impulse to film Kiki as if she is continually being looked
at or observed, as is often the case with women in the majority of Hollywood
films. He frequently includes moments like this where she is allowed to escape
from under our eyes, when it takes several seconds to realize where she has
gone or what has actually happened. A drawing of a character breaks free and
becomes something more than a collection of lines. She has a life that flies
beyond the director’s control.
If I seem to be making a great deal of Kiki’s opening half hour, it is not
a comment on the artistic merits or narrative interest of the rest of the film.
What intrigues me about Kiki is its artistry rather than its story, since in
straightforward Bildungsroman terms there is nothing particularly unconven-
tional about it. Kiki’s gifts as a witch are not sufficiently impressive when she
arrives in her chosen city to separate her from any other young girl, hence the
fact she has to work at a baker’s and deliver bread and cakes on her broom.
She becomes famous only when she puts her gifts to a non-commercial use,
by saving the life of her friend. There are clever relationship studies along the
way – the baker and his wife, for example, or Jiji’s courtship of the white cat,
Lily – but it is only when Kiki’s gifts as a witch begin to fail that the narrative
becomes original in terms of plot (in artistic terms, it is always so). Up to this
point, form and theme seem to be operating at cross-purposes. Miyazaki’s
concerns with anime as an art form that allows viewers to contemplate the
origins of drawing and through this the end point of life is subsumed by the
onward trajectory of Kiki’s story. There is little opportunity for those moments
of dead time I noted above.
Miyazaki’s love of dead time asserts itself again when Kiki first meets the
young painter Ursula. Kiki has been asked to deliver a toy cat to a house on

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 Jonathan Ellis

the edge of town. On the way, she is attacked by a flock of birds that think she
is attacking their nests, causing her to drop the toy into the forest below. In a
lovely comic scene, Jiji is forced to stand in for the lost toy while Kiki goes in
search of the real thing. There she meets Ursula, who lives alone in a log cabin
in the woods. There is of course a long tradition in both Anglo-American and
Japanese culture of artists retiring to the forest to seek solace in the imagina-
tion. Miyazaki makes dead time an artistic statement of intent here, not just a
trick of the eye. In so doing, he gives Kiki a mentor figure to turn to later on in
the film when her gift for flying disappears.
Ursula promises to repair the battered toy if Kiki will clean the cabin for
her. The former is fascinated by the younger girl’s appearance and her stub-
born determination. She admires both the figure the witch cuts in the air and
the young woman who animates her – the icon and the person behind it.
Something of this tension motivates the entire film. Miyazaki seems of two
minds whether to concentrate on Kiki as a vehicle to show off the painting
talents of his artistic team or Kiki as a character in her own right. In terms of
how this theme is represented stylistically, we witness a kind of (in)formal
stand-off between freeze-frames and moving pictures. In Ursula’s presence,
the former method usually prevails. When Kiki first meets her, the film’s pace
visibly slows down. It is like the scene in Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi/Spirited
Away (2001) when Chihiro helps a single dust bunny (a relation of the dust
bunnies in Totoro) to carry a lump of coal before being given the whole lot to
carry by the rest of his friends. Ursula provides Kiki with a similar amount
of tedious graft. As Andrew Osmond points out in connection with Spirited
Away, Miyazaki’s answer to existential questions is often ‘hard work but of a
different order from the jovial capitalism of Disney’s dwarves. […] This has
less to do with stereotypes of the industrious Japanese than with Miyazaki’s
own leftist leanings and belief in empowerment through labour. What makes
it more than dreary moralism are the witty riffs on the theme’ (Osmond
2003: 35). Miyazaki cuts between Kiki’s labours to pay off her debt to Ursula
and Jiji’s seemingly perilous situation at the house. On first viewing, we fear
for Jiji’s life because he has been given into the hands of a careless child; an
enormous hound also patrols the house. Yet on returning to the scene in the
house, we realize that the dog’s shielding of Jiji by the fire is clearly protective,
particularly when accompanied by the sound of a slowed-down brass band.
As time slows down for Jiji in a cold sweat beside the fire, it grinds to a halt
for Kiki, scrubbing the floor while Ursula works on in the corner, stitching the
toy cat back together.
Miyazaki gives us two portraits of the artist as a young woman here. Kiki
is all impulse, reacting to dangerous or unusual situations without thinking.
It makes her an effective and extremely versatile delivery girl, for example,
coming to the aid of an old woman who can no longer use her old-fashioned
stove on her own. It also helps her to save Tombo at the end of the film, utiliz-
ing a dustman’s push-brush to replace her broken broom. She is somebody
who continually improvises on the hop, more of an actress or dancer than a
novelist or poet, even though Miyazaki furnishes her with a dusty artist’s garret.
Ursula, on the other hand, represents a less instinctive artistry. She prepares
to paint by first drawing and sketching. Even when she reveals her painting of
Kiki towards the end of the film, it is still a work-in-progress. She is the type
of artist who redrafts and revises rather than painting or writing impulsively.
Miyazaki’s reputation suggests that he probably sees himself as more of an
Ursula than a Kiki, and in many respects the film supports this idea. Kiki loses

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 The art of anime

her gift and has to work hard to regain it. Yet perhaps the two women repre-
sent alternatives of different kinds of artistic approach rather than a recom-
mendation of one over the other (a theory supported by Miyazaki’s decision to
use the same actress to voice both parts). As Susan Napier observes:

Not only is anime worth studying in terms of its status as cultural

export, but it is also a fascinating harbinger of what might be a new way
of looking at national culture and identity, one that rests less on a firm
separation or even interplay between self and Other, and more on the
gradual acknowledgement that in the transnational, postmodern world
of contemporary mass culture, the Other (in terms of both national and
gender divisions) might increasingly be imbricated within the self.
(Napier 2001: 470)

Kiki and Ursula could be two sides of Miyazaki’s self – two ways of looking at
the world. As French theorist Julia Kristeva points out in her suggestively titled
book Strangers to Ourselves, ‘the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face
of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which under-
standing and affinity flounder’ (Kristeva 1991: 1). Kiki and Ursula recognize
elements in each other that both have been trying to hide or repress. For Kiki,
Ursula has lived through an artistic block and come out the other side. She is
a model of patience and recovery. For Ursula, Kiki is ‘the hidden face’ of her
identity, the impulsive urge to instant creativity she has placed on hold. Both
characteristics meet in the painting Ursula creates at the end of the film, a
Marc Chagall-like dreamscape that depicts Kiki in flight surrounded by night
and freezes it for the viewer’s contemplation, just as Miyazaki himself takes a
story of artistic development and uses it to meditate on the still-life origins of
the anime form.
As well as operating within the genre boundaries of a Bildungsroman,
Kiki’s Delivery Service thus also functions as a Künstlerroman, a story of artistic
apprenticeship and discovery. This allows Miyazaki, as we have seen, to adapt
Kiki’s story to comment on contemporary Japanese society and the practi-
cal consequences of the collapse of the ‘bubble economy’ in the early 1990s.
As there are several planes of background and foreground in motion at any
one time in an anime frame, so Miyazaki puts in play a series of artistic and
social messages. In Bildungsroman terms, Kiki’s loss of magical powers half-
way through the film is part of her individual narrative of self-discovery. In
Künstlerroman terms, the collapse is also artistic – the failure to keep a lofty
ideal in motion. In political terms, the metaphor is even starker. The economic
miracle is over. Above and beyond this, as suggested in the English transla-
tion of the Japanese title, Kiki’s Delivery Service also performs a spiritual func-
tion. In encouraging us to confront the ending or pausing of images, Miyazaki
reminds us of our own mortality. Like Keats’s Grecian Urn, the beauty of
anime is in part this ‘Cold Pastoral’ core (Keats 1995: 216): a truth that lies
underneath all human animation.

REFERENCES
Cavallaro, Dani (2006), The Animé Art of Hayao Miyazaki, Jefferson and
London: McFarland.
Chute, David (1988), ‘Organic Machine: The World of Hayao Miyazaki’, Film
Comment, XXXIV: 6, pp. 62–4.

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 Jonathan Ellis

Keats, John (1995), Selected Poems, London: Everyman.

Kristeva, Julia (1991), Strangers to Ourselves, New York: Columbia University
Press.
Lamarre, Thomas (2002), ‘From animation to anime: drawing movements and
moving drawings’, Japan Forum, 14: 2, pp. 329–67.
McCarthy, Helen (2002), Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation,
Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press.
Mes, Tom and Sharp, Jasper (2005), The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese
Cinema, Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press.
Mulvey, Laura (1989), ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Visual and
other Pleasures, London: Macmillan, pp. 14–26.
Napier, Susan J. (2001), ‘Confronting Master Narratives: History as Vision in
Hayao Miyazaki’s Cinema of De-assurance’, Positions, 9: 2, pp. 467–93.
Osmond, Andrew (2003), ‘Gods and monsters’, Sight & Sound, September 2003,
pp. 34–35.
—— (2008), Spirited Away, London: British Film Institute.

SUGGESTED CITATION
Ellis, J. (2010), ‘The art of anime: Freeze-frames and moving pictures in Miyazaki
Hayao’s Kiki’s Delivery Service’, Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema 2: 1,
pp. 21–34, doi: 10.1386/jjkc.2.1.21_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Jonathan Ellis is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at the University of
Sheffield. He is the author of Art and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop
(2006), as well as articles and essays on Woody Allen, Paul Muldoon, Sylvia
Plath and Anne Stevenson. In 2005 his interview with the Japanese writer
Murakami Haruki appeared in The Georgia Review. His next book is on
twentieth-century letter writing. He has been the recipient of a Leverhulme
Early Career Fellowship and, more recently, a British Academy Research
Development Award.
Contact: School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Jessop West,
1 Upper Hanover Street, Sheffield S3 7RA, UK.
E-mail: j.s.ellis@sheffield.ac.uk

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