Kiki's Delivery Service

Kiki's Delivery Service is the Ghibli film about creative blocks, identity, and the anxiety of beginning — themes wrapped in such warmth and visual joy that the film functions simultaneously as gentle family entertainment and a genuinely perceptive portrait of the transition from adolescence to independence. Thirteen-year-old Kiki, per witch tradition, must spend a year in a new city using her flying ability to become self-sufficient. Her delivery service, built from scratch in an unfamiliar coastal town, thrives and then falters as Kiki loses the ability to fly — a crisis that maps with uncomfortable precision onto the experience of losing confidence in work that once came naturally. Miyazaki's touch with the film's world — the town's architecture, the sea, the casual warmth of its inhabitants — makes every frame a pleasure to inhabit. Joji Hisaishi's score remains one of his most beloved.