--- title: "Kiki's Delivery Service (1989), rewatched Nov 2026" description: "Out of every fictional universe ever made, this is the one I'd move to." url: https://www.joekarlsson.com/reviews/kikis-delivery-service-1/ --- ![A still from Kiki's Delivery Service (1989)](https://www.joekarlsson.com/images/reviews/kikis-delivery-service-1/backdrop.webp) # Kiki's Delivery Service (1989) Nov 2, 2026 | 3 min read | Rated 5 out of 5 | Dir. Hayao Miyazaki | Rewatch Out of every fictional universe ever made, this is the one I’d move to. It’s the one place out of everything anyone has ever made up where I’d actually want to live. Kiki flies into a seaside town that looks like a Europe WW2 never touched: bakeries, a clock tower, a blimp over the harbor, nobody trying to kill anybody. A world at peace is so rare in fiction. Nobody is coming for Kiki, so what goes wrong in this movie is mostly Kiki working herself too hard. I’ve always read Kiki’s Delivery Service as a movie about burnout, and specifically millennial burnout. Kiki is 13 and she’s already living the career advice my generation grew up on: find the thing you love and make it your job. Her one gift is flying, so she turns it into a delivery service. The work she loves is care work for strangers, and the customer who matters most to her is a granddaughter who hates her grandma’s herring pie and shuts the door on Kiki after she’s carried it through a rainstorm and missed the party she’d been waiting for. When Tombo’s friends hear the delivery girl is already working, one of them calls it admirable. Everybody around her applauds a 13-year-old for having a job, and she takes the praise as a reason to leave and get back to work. Then it all goes at once. She tells Jiji something’s wrong with her, that the cheerful Kiki has disappeared. That night she can’t understand him. The next morning she can’t fly, and she tells Osono that if her magic goes, there’s nothing else she knows how to do. Anne Helen Petersen called millennials the burnout generation back in 2019, and Kiki walks right into the same trap. We were told to turn the thing we love into our income, so when the income goes bad, the thing we love goes with it. This time, halfway through Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, I noticed it’s also a movie about how you get out of it. Cameron treats workaholism as a creative block, the same one Kiki just hit. Kiki’s night in the woods with Ursula, a painter who lives alone in a cabin, is her first artist date, and it runs through Cameron’s program in one bedtime conversation. Ursula says magic and painting are a lot alike, and that sometimes she just can’t paint. She grinds at it, and when that fails she quits: walks, scenery, naps, nothing at all, until the urge comes back on its own. She’s filling the well. She also hit her own wall at about Kiki’s age, when she realized everything she drew copied somebody else and she had to find her own style, the same identity work Cameron gives a whole week to. Then Ursula calls the thing that makes a witch fly, an artist paint and a baker bake an energy handed down by the gods, or somebody, one that makes you suffer sometimes. Cameron subtitled her book A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, and Ursula is saying the same thing. Kiki admits she’d never thought about her magic before; she figured her training was just an old-fashioned custom. It’s the first time she treats her gift as hers instead of as a service she sells. Kiki is a kid and she’s already learning this, even if the cabin doesn’t fix her overnight. The next time she flies, it’s on a deck brush borrowed off a street sweeper, to save a friend, with nobody paying her for it. I’m a lot older than 13 and I’m still working on it. I think we can all learn a lesson from Kiki. Stray thoughts: - I cry at two parts of Kiki’s Delivery Service every time. The first is the goodbye at the start, when Kiki asks her dad, Okino, to lift her up high like when she was little, and he can’t believe how big she’s gotten. You can tell he’s supportive and heartbroken and wants her to stay, and it kills me. - The second is when Kiki loses the ability to talk to her cat, Jiji, and (in the original, anyway) never gets it back. Something from her childhood is lost and never recovered. I read Jiji as her childlike wonder, and losing his voice as her finding a more adult way forward. Producer Toshio Suzuki has said Jiji is “another self” for Kiki, so I’m taking that as permission. Also on [Letterboxd](https://letterboxd.com/joekarlsson/film/kikis-delivery-service/1/) ## Works on My Machine Get the next post by email. My newsletter covers homelab builds, AI tools and open source, and it goes out when I have something to say. It's free, and you can unsubscribe anytime. You'll get an email to confirm first. ![Joe Karlsson at his desk, chin on hand, with a microphone in front of him](https://www.joekarlsson.com/images/about/collage/studio.webp) Joe Karlsson I write about my homelab, AI tools, databases, and the weird stuff I build on the side. [More about me →](https://www.joekarlsson.com/about/) [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/joekarlsson.com) | [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/joekarlsson/) | [GitHub](https://github.com/JoeKarlsson)