Kiki's Delivery Service

Basic Information
Kiki's Delivery Serviceis a 1989 Japanese animated fantasy film produced, written, and directed by Hayao Miyazaki. It was the fourth theatrically released Studio Ghibli film. It was the first Studio Ghibli movie released under the Disney/Studio Ghibli partnership; Disney recorded an English dub in 1997, which premiered theatrically in the United States at the Seattle International Film Festival May 23, 1998. It was released on home video in the U.S. on September 1, 1998

Plot
Kiki is a 13-year-old witch-in-training, living in a village where her mother is the resident herbalist. It is traditional for witches to live for a year alone when they reach 13 years of age. In the opening of the story, Kiki takes off for the big city with her best friend Jiji, a loquacious black cat. Kiki settles in Koriko, a port city. After a hard start, mostly because of her own insecurity, Kiki finds friends and a place to stay. But she has only one witch's skill: her ability to fly on a broom, at which she is still not fully proficient. So, in order to support herself, she begins a delivery service.

Production
Miyazaki took up the role as producer of the film while the position of director was still unfilled. During the start of the project and the nearing of Totoro's completion, members of Studio Ghibli were being recruited for senior staff for the Kiki’s Delivery Service project. The character design position was given to Katsuya Kondo, who was working with Miyazaki on Totoro. Hiroshi Ohno, who would later work on projects such as Jin-Roh, was hired as art director, partly because he was requested by Kazuo Oga, who was part of Miyazaki's Totoro team as well.

Although many positions had been filled, the project still lacked a director. Miyazaki, busy with Totoro, looked at many directors himself, but found none he thought fit to articulate the project. Finally they found a director, Sunao Katabuchi (which was to be his directorial debut) who had previously worked with Miyazaki on Sherlock Hound. Ghibli hired Nobuyuki Isshiki to write the script but Miyazaki was disappointed by the first draft, finding it dry and too divergent from his own vision of the film. Studio Ghibli rejected this draft of the screenplay after Miyazaki voiced his disapproval.

Finally, when Totoro was finished and released, Miyazaki began to look more closely at Kiki’s Delivery Service. He started by writing a screenplay himself, and since Majo no Takkyūbin was based in a fictional country in northern Europe, he and the senior staff went to research landscapes and other elements of the setting. Their main stops were Stockholm and the Swedish island of Gotland. Eventually Miyazaki took over as director when Katabuchi got intimidated.

Differences between original and dubbed versions
Disney's English dub of Kiki's Delivery Service contained some changes, which have been described as "pragmatic". All changes were approved by Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. An example occurs near the beginning of the movie as Kiki flies away from home. In the Japanese version, Kiki bumps into a tree but then continues onward in silence. In the English dub, she shouts a final "Goodbye, everyone!". There are a number of additions and embellishments to the musical score, and there are several lavish sound effects over sections which are silent in the Japanese original. For example, compare the "wild geese" adventure in both versions. The extra pieces of music (provided by Paul Chihara) ranged from soft piano music to a string-plucked rendition of Edvard Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King. The original opening and ending theme songs were replaced by two new songs, "Soaring" and "I'm Gonna Fly", written and performed for the English movie by Sydney Forest. The character of the cat, Jiji, changed significantly. In the Japanese version, Jiji is voiced by a female performer, while in the American version Jiji is performed by Saturday Night Live alumnus Phil Hartman, and also has more of a wisecracking demeanor. In Japanese culture, cats are usually depicted with feminine voices, whereas in American culture their voices are more gender-specific. A number of Hartman's lines exist where Jiji simply says nothing in the original (such as in the scene where Jiji approaches Lili along the top of the wall). Jiji's personality is notably different between the two versions, showing a more cynical and sarcastic attitude in the 1998 English version as opposed to cautious and conscience-like in the original Japanese. In the original Japanese script, Jiji loses his ability to communicate with Kiki permanently, but in the American version a line is added which implies she is once again able to understand him. Miyazaki has said that Jiji is the immature side of Kiki, and this implies that Kiki, by the end of the original Japanese version, has matured beyond talking to her cat. More minor changes to appeal to the different teenage habits of the day include Kiki drinking hot chocolate instead of coffee and referring to "cute boys" instead of to "the disco". The English subtitled script used for the original VHS subbed release and the later DVD release, more closely adheres to the Japanese script, but still contains a few alterations. It is based on the original Streamline dub, and has resulted in several additions from that dub to migrate into the script regardless of whether they are present or not (such as Herbert Morrison's "Oh the humanity!" line during the blimp sequence). This came about because Tokuma gave Disney the script for the original dub, thinking it was an accurate translation, leaving this as the script that Disney worked on.