I don’t buy all that many commercial videotapes, and I don’t remember buying one before that was for an unreleased (at least in the U.S.) motion picture, though these seem to be becoming more common, particularly for cartoons. But my wife wanted this one — a TV ad had impressed her — so we went out to buy it.

Problem: Sun Coast didn’t have it. They were all sold out. Apparently it’s been going like hotcakes. Ultimately, we waited two weeks for them to get a new batch in. Finally, Saturday evening, I managed to find a copy.

“Kiki’s Delivery Service” was a find. This Japanese animation is the story of a young (13 years old) witch, about to go out into the world on her own and undergo a year of “training”. She sets out at midnight on a clear night with a full moon (this is tradition, it seems), with her black cat Jiji, her mother’s broom (no frequent flier miles), her father’s transistor radio, and a bag containing anything she might need to live on her own, and makes her way to a coastal city (she has always wanted to see the ocean) which has no witches of its own and so is available to her. There she finds a home in the upstairs room of a bakery and opens a flying delivery service. After various adventures and problems, she has a crisis of confidence that deprives her of her magic, but recovers it when she must face a considerably greater crisis, one that affects not only her but a boy-friend named Tombo and the entire city. (Note: listen very carefully, throughout the film, to the occasional background radio commentary — it really does have a bearing on the story.)

I think that whoever wrote this story must also have lost a daughter to a distant college a year or so ago, since he or she seems to understand the problems that both parents and children face when confronted with such a sudden separation. The character animation is not outstanding, though some of the characterizations (particularly, to me, the self-effacing baker’s husband, whose role is heavily understated — this is primarily a film for and about women) are interesting. What is, again IMHO, outstanding is the background detail, into which a lot of loving effort seems to have gone. Kiki’s world is one I wouldn’t mind living in — an old-world city set between a sprawling rural landscape and a vast oceanscape, where modern technology lives comfortably side-by-side with old-fashioned values. And the flight scenes were, to me, awesomely done; to paraphrase Richard Donner’s “Superman”, you’ll believe a little girl can fly. Watch, early in the film, for a quick shot of a night-flight passenger plane passing close above Kiki.

Note: this film is going to upset the same batch of people who tried to get “The Wizard of Oz” kicked off library shelves because the character of Glinda might mislead little children into believing that there are, somewhere, witches who are not ugly and evil. Kiki is even worse; Glinda was at least a grownup, but here is someone with whom kids can identify. Naughty, you Japanese animators, naughty, naughty!