Up in the Air

Studio Ghibli's anime Kiki's Delivery Service to me, is about Miyazaki's dreams of flying. It takes place in a picturesque but vaguely defined ~1930s European location. Kiki is a young witch. When witches in this milieu are 13 years old, they must leave home and find a town that needs a witch. So she takes off on her broom with her talking black cat Gigi.

She finds a large and lovely city by the sea, where the people are friendly, except perhaps the police. She soon has a suitor, a bike-riding boy with rolled up jeans, a red striped shirt and a yellow sweater tied around his neck - Tin-Tin, in other words. I guess we are in Belgium. And yet she feels like an outsider.

I couldn't quite buy this plotline - everybody loves Kiki, and supports her, and she is unfailingly polite and helpful. But if someone just looks at her sideways, she gets all "boohoo, I'll never fit in". Heck, the mean girls who talk about her behind her back are saying, "She has a job and she's only 13? That's so cool."

What I did buy without question was the flying. This animation is very much about flying, clouds, waves and the wind. Consider - you can't animate wind, you need to animate the blowing clothes, the wheeling birds, the waving treetops. His studio does this very beautifully.

We also get to see up Kiki's dress a lot, what with the wind and the broomstick riding and everything. Not that there is anything prurient about it. Just thought I should mention it.