Kiki's Delivery Service
Short description
Kiki's Delivery Service follows a young witch who, as part of a longstanding tradition, must leave home at thirteen and spend a year living among ordinary people. She flies to a seaside town with her black cat, Jiji, and struggles to settle into a community where she is an outsider. A kind baker gives her a place to stay, and Kiki starts an air courier business using her broom, an arrangement that brings her into contact with many of the town's residents. As the work picks up, she still has to contend with loneliness and with the feeling of being different from those around her.
Hayao Miyazaki wrote and directed the film, the fifth of the sixteen features he has directed in chronological order, arriving between My Neighbor Totoro in 1988 and Porco Rosso in 1992. Miyazaki also produced alongside Toshio Suzuki and Eiko Tanaka, and Studio Ghibli handled production with Nippon Television Network Corporation, Nibariki and Tokuma Shoten. The voice cast is led by Minami Takayama as Kiki and Ursula, with Rei Sakuma as Jiji, Kappei Yamaguchi as Tombo, Keiko Toda as Osono, Mieko Nobusawa as Kokiri and Koichi Miura as Okino, among twenty-seven credited cast members and eighty credited crew.
The film runs 103 minutes across the adventure, animation, drama, family and fantasy genres. Its ratings sit at 7.8 out of 10 on IMDb from about 186,000 votes and 7.8 out of 10 on TMDB from roughly 4,700 votes, while a critics' rating of 8.3 out of 10 comes from forty-seven reviews.
What's left behind the scenes
- The bakery 'Guchokipanya's' name is a play on words consisting of two parts: 'guchokipa' – the famous rock-paper-scissors game, and 'pan’ya' – bakery.
- Initially, the film was planned to be 60 minutes long.
- While working on the film, Hayao Miyazaki and his artists traveled to Sweden to thoroughly research the landscapes for the film. The photographs they took in Stockholm and Visby form the main background of the fictional city of Koriko. The city also contains elements of Lisbon, Paris, San Francisco, and Milan.
- This cartoon used 462 colors.
- Ursula's painting is called “The Ship Sailing Over the Rainbow” and was mostly drawn by students from a school for children with intellectual disabilities.
- The creation of this film used 67,317 hand-drawn frames.
- In the Spanish version of the cartoon, Kiki was renamed Niki, and accordingly, the cartoon was titled: 'Nicky la aprendiz de bruja,' which means 'Niki – the young witch apprentice.' This was justified by the fact that the word 'kiki' in the local slang means 'quick sex.'
- The idea for the book was inspired by the insight of Yamato Unyu, the founder of the Yamato Transport company, who created a corporate logo with a cat and black kitten and the advertising slogan 'The Witch's Black Cat Delivery Service.' Yamato Transport sponsored the film's production.
- When Kiki first arrives in the city, she crashes into a bus with the inscription Studio Ghibli.
- In the Japanese version, after a series of events, Jiji permanently loses the ability to communicate with Kiki, while in one of the English dubs at the very end of the film, it can be understood that the cat and Kiki have begun to understand each other again.
- Eiko Kadono's book is a collection of separate stories about Kiki's adventures. When Hayao Miyazaki made significant changes to the plot to create a cohesive and consistent screenplay, Kadono became angry and refused to allow a film adaptation. She had to be persuaded for a long time.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
