At her mother's behest, 13-year-old witch Kiki sets out on a year-long apprenticeship with her black cat in tow. She soon finds fitting into a new community difficult while she supports herself by running an air courier service.
The magic of Kiki is the girl's sense of wonder in her new world, whether it's her soaring flight among the migrating geese or a bicycle ride... to see the dirigible.
[Miyazaki] revitalizes conventional tropes, using elegant imagery to say something substantial about growing up, and he even subverts gender stereotypes along the way.
The characters are gently and warmly rendered, and a climactic action sequence involving an unmoored dirigible hints at the stately grandiosity of Miyazaki's masterpiece Howl's Moving Castle.
A terrific alternative to the diabetic's nightmare that is most of Disney's output, Kiki's Delivery Service takes pride of place in Miyazaki's exceptional body of work.
The film becomes a benign guided tour of femininity ... gently broaching universal coming-of-age issues such as independence, insecurity, and even - more boldly than any Western children's movie would contemplate - sexuality.
The film's status as a top-tier animated endeavor is baffling, to say the least, and it's ultimately difficult not to wonder what its ardent followers have embraced so passionately over the years.