Hirokatsu Kihara, former production manager at Studio Ghibli, returned to FanimeCon 2024 to commemorate the 35th anniversary of Kiki’s Delivery Service. This appearance comes one year after Kihara attended the con to celebrate another Studio Ghibli milestone, the 35th anniversary of My Neighbor Totoro. Asia Blooming sat down with Kihara to discuss his experience working on Kiki’s Delivery Service and his perspective on takeaways from the film.
After completing My Neighbor Totoro, there was about a four-month break before the team started working on Kiki’s Delivery Service. While Hayao Miyazaki was always set to work on Kiki’s Delivery Service, he originally was supposed to serve as a producer. However, it was later decided that Miyazaki would direct the film due to complications with the original director. As a result, the team had to work on a very tight schedule to create the film. “We ended up losing about three months time, when we could have been working on the film [due to these changes]. We had to squeeze in production in a very short amount of time,” Kihara started. “Even though the quality of the film is very high, I do have to say that completing it was quite challenging.”
The film follows Kiki on her journey as a young witch who must move to a new town and find her calling. When the team first heard the premise of the film, they thought, ‘What can a 13 year old even possibly do all by themselves?’ Kihara shared, “Director Miyazaki also really struggled with this idea. However, we didn’t want to make a movie in which the message is that just because you’re young, you can’t do anything.” Thus, the team worked together to find a way to portray how a young teen could leave home and support themselves.
Life can take us to many places, many of them unexpected. In Kiki’s case, she boards a train to get out of the rain, but when she wakes up, she opens the door and finds herself in a completely different place. As this takes Kiki to her new home, Kihara said, “Another message in the film is that it’s up to you to do your best when faced with the unexpected. It’s amazing what Kiki does given how young she is. For a 13 year old, Kiki is quite mature, as she takes in her situation and tries to figure out what to do without crying or complaining.”
Kiki doesn’t embark on this journey without any help though. Jiji, her black cat companion, is by her side as she navigates a new town and its community. She frequently has conversations with Jiji throughout the film, but that ability ends up fading away once Kiki gets a handle on her new life. “For many people, they had an imaginary friend at some point when they were a baby or toddler. Regardless of whether that imaginary friend existed or not, the fact that it was a way for you to develop that skill is what’s important,” Kihara shared. “In that same way, it doesn’t matter whether or not Jiji was able to speak. The thing that’s important is that Jiji was her friend and he offered her a way to be able understand what she needed to understand in that moment. Once that need for him [to speak] disappeared, he was still her cat that cared about her.”
To build this world in which witches coexist with regular humans, Kihara said it was important to establish one foundational thing: magic cannot be perfect. If magic could solve everything, there would be no story to tell. While each witch in the film has a special power such as Kiki’s mother being skilled at potion-making and another young witch excelling at divination, Kiki is still trying to figure out her own. Although Kiki struggles with flying on a broom at the beginning of her journey, she hones that ability over time and turns it into a skill: “The message we really want to tell, especially to children, is that everyone is capable of many different things.” Kihara added, “Something I really love about this story is that the thing that becomes the key to unlocking Kiki’s abilities is her feelings of wanting to protect a friend.”
