Hayao Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service(Studio Ghibli Official) opened in Japan on July 29, 1989. I was already alive then, though I first saw it on television rather than in a cinema. Its commercial success was followed by Studio Ghibli’s move to employ its animators as permanent staff. In that sense, it may mark a turning point for the studio.
When I watch this film absent-mindedly, Yumi Matsutoya’s “Rouge no Dengon” and “Yasashisa ni Tsutsumareta Nara” sometimes stay with me more vividly than the story itself. I finish without quite being able to say what happened—and still enjoy it. That is Miyazaki’s magic, I think. Here, I will revisit the story and explore three questions it raises. This synopsis reveals the whole story, so expect spoilers. If you want to avoid them, stop partway through and watch the film first.
*This is a translated version. The original (Japanese) is available here.
- Detailed Synopsis and Character Map
Thirteen-year-old Kiki sets out to live independently, arrives in a town by the sea, and starts a delivery service. She experiences setbacks and loneliness, but through her encounters with others and her own efforts, she flies again and finds a place to live. Below are the full synopsis, a character map, and a discussion of the story. - Three Questions to Explore
Why is the senior witch so cold? Why does Kiki lose her ability to fly? And why does Jiji remain silent after she recovers it? I offer my readings of these questions and link to the longer discussions.
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Kiki’s Delivery Service: Full Synopsis (Spoilers)
The following synopsis traces Kiki’s journey from leaving home to finding her place in a new town.
Quick Summary: Nine Plot Points
Here are the main events of Kiki’s Delivery Service:
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Leaving Home
Thirteen-year-old Kiki leaves her parents to train as a witch and find a town of her own. -
The Freedom of Flight
She flies on her mother’s broom towards an unfamiliar town by the sea. -
Starting a Delivery Service
Kiki puts her ability to fly to work, opening a delivery service from a bakery. -
Her Bond with Jiji
Her companion, the black cat Jiji, supports her with humor and sometimes pointed advice. -
Meeting the Townspeople
Kiki meets the people of her new town. Osono offers her a room and encouragement, giving her a place to start. -
Difficulties and Setbacks
Problems with deliveries, loneliness, and uncertainty shake Kiki’s confidence. Eventually, she can no longer fly. -
Encouragement and Reflection
With help from the townspeople and advice from the young painter Ursula, Kiki begins to look at herself differently. -
Kiki’s Growth
When Tombo needs rescuing from an airship, Kiki takes to the sky again and saves him. -
A New Beginning
Kiki continues her life in the town, with renewed confidence and friendships.
Character Map
A Reading of Kiki’s Growth
For me, Kiki’s Delivery Service is a story about growing into a strength of one’s own. Kiki’s loss of magic gives her an opportunity to grow. But asking why she loses it, and what that loss means, takes us beyond a simple account of the plot.
In my reading, Kiki starts out with “savings”: the talent represented by her mother’s broom, and the unfounded feeling of invincibility accumulated over her first thirteen years. Those resources help her leave home, but they cannot carry her through every difficulty.
The herring-pie delivery brings Kiki up against another person whose response she cannot resolve for herself. Realizing the limits of what she has brought from home becomes the starting point for developing her own strength.
I also read Jiji as a kind of stuffed animal reflecting Kiki’s inner life, and their conversations as conversations with herself. Once she encounters a problem that such inner dialogue cannot solve, Jiji’s role changes. These are my interpretations, rather than explanations the film spells out.
With those questions in mind, let us follow the story through to its ending.
Detailed Synopsis: From Departure to the Ending
Part 1: Leaving Home and Arriving in Koriko
The story’s heroine is Kiki, a thirteen-year-old witch. When the time comes to live independently, she leaves her parents with Jiji to find a town of her own. She has made a new broom for the occasion, but her mother stops her from taking it. In the end, she sets out on her mother’s old, large broom.
On the way, Kiki meets an older witch who has already found her town. Excited about the life ahead, Kiki tries to ask her questions, only to receive an unexpectedly cold response. It is a slight shock to be treated this way by another witch, but Kiki continues on her journey.
Then the weather suddenly turns. Despite a forecast of clear skies, Kiki is caught in heavy rain. She takes shelter in a freight car, fortunately filled with straw. She means to rest for a little while, but falls asleep.
When she wakes, the train is running along the coast. Outside is a beautiful town—the town with a sea view she has been looking for. If no other witch lives there, she thinks, she will make it her own.
The town is lively, but people look curiously at the girl flying on a broom. Kiki loses control while trying to avoid a double-decker bus amid the traffic, and her flight through the streets becomes rather more chaotic than intended.
Naturally, a police officer stops to question her. Kiki insists that witches fly, but this explanation gets her nowhere. Then someone shouts, “Thief!” The officer tells Kiki to stay put and runs to investigate. The shout comes from Tombo, a boy fascinated by the flying witch.
Tombo has invented the alarm to help her. Kiki is grateful, but reads his interest in her as the same unwelcome curiosity she has encountered elsewhere and brushes him off. Tombo still seems pleased to have met her.
With this unpromising start behind her, Kiki looks for somewhere to stay. No lodging will take a child on her own. She wanders without a destination, feeling alone in the unfamiliar town, until a woman hurries out of a bakery carrying a pacifier a customer has forgotten. Kiki offers to return it for her and flies off to do so.
After delivering the pacifier, Kiki intends to say goodbye and leave. Instead, the baker invites her inside to thank her.
Over a drink, the woman hears about Kiki’s situation and offers her a spare room. It is exactly what Kiki needs, and she gladly accepts. Her host is known locally as Osono the baker. At last, after a hectic day, Kiki can go to sleep.
Part 2: The Delivery Service and the Loss of Magic
With a base secured, Kiki decides to make deliveries her job. Osono, who is pregnant, lets her take orders at the bakery in return for helping in the shop. The room is free, with breakfast included. Kiki resolves to work hard for her.
A woman living nearby commissions Kiki to deliver a stuffed cat to her nephew as a birthday present. She is a regular at the bakery and seems to have heard about Kiki from Osono.
Nervous but hopeful, Kiki sets out on her first job. A gust blows her into the woods, where the branches break her fall. She is unhurt, but loses the stuffed cat. When she tries to return and search, the crows whose nest she has disturbed attack her and drive her away.
Kiki proposes a makeshift solution: Jiji can pretend to be the stuffed cat at the recipient’s house while she searches for the real one. “Proposes” is perhaps generous—Jiji has little choice but to go along with it.
Back in the woods, Kiki finds a cabin with the missing toy on its windowsill. She goes in to find the owner, only to hear a voice from the roof. Ursula, the young woman who lives there, is drawing the crows. She has found the toy in the woods and returns it, but its neck is damaged.
Ursula offers to mend the toy if Kiki cleans the cabin. Kiki gets to work without a moment’s hesitation.
With the repaired toy, Kiki heads back to complete the delivery and rescue Jiji. Getting him out looks difficult, but the household’s dog comes to their aid. After a hectic day, Kiki has managed to finish her first job.
Word spreads, and requests for Kiki’s services gradually increase. Then Tombo visits the bakery to invite her to a flying-club party. He gives the busy Kiki an invitation and says he will come for her at six that evening. She can decide whether to attend by then.
Kiki acts cool towards him, but is secretly excited about the invitation. First, though, she has two deliveries to make. At the second house, an elderly woman wants to send her granddaughter a herring-and-pumpkin pie for her birthday.
The electric oven has broken, and the woman is about to give up. Kiki suggests using the old wood-fired oven and helps with the cooking. They successfully finish the woman’s specialty.
Kiki hurries to deliver the finished pie. The clear sky clouds over, and rain begins to fall. She presses on, with the time of her appointment with Tombo approaching.
At last she reaches the house, but the granddaughter’s reaction surprises her. The girl says she does not much like herring pie and reluctantly accepts it, showing little pleasure in the gift.
Kiki has done her job properly, yet cannot quite make sense of the granddaughter’s response. In the end, she misses her arrangement with Tombo, too. It is a strange experience of failure.
The next morning, Kiki has a cold. Osono makes her porridge and lets her rest. Tombo returns to the bakery and asks to visit her when he hears she is ill, but Osono tactfully declines. Tombo and Osono are both good people!
After a day’s rest, Kiki feels better. Before she resumes deliveries, Osono sends her on a small errand: taking bread to someone called “Kopori.” When she reaches the house, Kiki realizes what Osono has arranged. Kopori is Tombo.
Kiki worries about having missed their appointment, but Tombo is quite untroubled. He invites her into the garage to show her a bicycle fitted with a propeller—the engine section of a human-powered aircraft. The party was meant to celebrate its completion.
Tombo suggests riding it to see the airship that has made an emergency landing nearby. Kiki has not heard about this while she was ill, but decides to go with him. After a few mishaps on the peculiar bicycle, they reach the coast where the airship has landed. For Kiki, it is a thoroughly enjoyable time.
Then Tombo’s friends arrive by car. They have a fashionable air about them and tell him they can look inside the airship. Tombo is delighted, but Kiki feels left out and rebuffed. She leaves, to his confusion, and he goes on to the airship.
Back in her room, Kiki reproaches herself for the way she has behaved. But something more serious has happened: Jiji answers her only with a meow. She can no longer understand him. Kiki immediately tries to fly, only to find that her magic has weakened. She tries again and again, breaking her mother’s broom in the process.
Kiki is bewildered by the loss of her power. Above her, the airship passes by.
Part 3: Rescuing Tombo and Finding Her Wings
Flying was Kiki’s one special ability, and she is despondent without it. Ursula visits, and Kiki tells her what has happened. The painter invites her to stay at the cabin.
There, Kiki learns that Ursula sometimes finds herself unable to paint. Ursula tells her about the struggle to work through such times. Her words, and the time they spend together, come as a kind of blessing to Kiki in her distress.
The next morning, something unexpected happens. A gust sends the airship out of control. A boy who tries to stop it is left hanging in the air beneath it. Of course, that boy is Tombo.
Kiki rushes to help. Though she seems to have lost her ability to fly, she borrows a push-broom from a street cleaner and tries to take off to rescue him.
The girl who had apparently lost her power rises into the sky on the push-broom! She reaches Tombo and saves him.
The townspeople welcome Kiki with cheers. Jiji appears, too. Although Kiki has recovered her magic, she still cannot understand him. Even so, she greets him with a smile.
Life goes on for Kiki, but it is no longer the life she faced when she first arrived. She can live here now—in the town by the sea.
That is the story of Kiki’s Delivery Service. Next, I want to consider a few questions that arise while watching it.
▼ Explore the film’s memorable dialogue in Japanese and English
Many of the film’s emotional turning points are expressed through memorable dialogue—from Kiki admitting that flying has become a job to Ursula describing the loss of her creative confidence and Kiki finally declaring her love for the town. Compare the original Japanese, romanization, English subtitles, literal translations, and detailed commentary in 15 Kiki’s Delivery Service Quotes in Japanese and English, Explained.
Kiki’s Delivery Service: Analysis and Interpretation
The senior witch, Kiki’s loss of flight, and Jiji’s silence each raise questions about her growing independence.
Why Is the Senior Witch So Cold?
Kiki’s conversation with the senior witch leaves an uncomfortable impression. Her prickly manner unsettles us much as it does Kiki.
First, consider that the story would work perfectly well without this encounter. Yet the filmmakers went to the trouble of animating it. What purpose does it serve?
I read the senior witch as representing the difficulties other young witches may have faced. Kiki’s good fortune in meeting Osono looks all the more remarkable beside that imagined history. Perhaps she also offers a knowing excuse for the story’s convenience. I may have let my imagination run a little too far—compare this reading with your own.
Read the full analysis: Why Is the Senior Witch So Unfriendly?
Why Does Kiki Lose Her Ability to Fly?
The central crisis of Kiki’s Delivery Service is surely Kiki’s loss of flight. Miyazaki handles it so deftly that, although we find it strange, we may accept it without thinking much about why it happens.
It gives Kiki an opportunity to grow, but it is also worth asking what it means. My interpretation involves the “savings” she brings from home: inherited talent and an unfounded sense of invincibility. The pie delivery forces her to recognize loneliness and the limits of what those resources can do. How would you explain the loss of her magic?
Read the full analysis: Why Kiki Can’t Fly: Talent and Growing Up
Why Does Jiji Remain Silent at the End?
Jiji’s silence is connected to Kiki’s loss of flight. When her magic disappears—or weakens—it does not seem so strange that she can no longer understand him.
But at the end, Kiki’s magic has returned and Jiji still meows like an ordinary cat. Why? I read him as a kind of stuffed animal reflecting her inner life, their talk as inner dialogue. Her encounter with another person who cannot be understood through that dialogue brings his old role to an end. Try putting your own response into words and comparing it with mine.
Read the full analysis: Why Jiji Still Can’t Talk at the End
Your Take: Jiji’s Silence
Kiki can fly again, but her conversations with Jiji have changed. How does that ending feel to you?
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