Nostalgic Anime Retrospective No.32] The Interest of "The Witch's Delivery Service" as Deciphered from its "Vehicle

Mary and the Witch's Flower," the first independent film by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, a former Studio Ghibli director, is now in theaters. The Witch is Back Again. (1989).
When one thinks of "The Witch's Delivery Service," the first thing that comes to mind is the scene where the main character, Kiki, rides astride a broomstick, but the broomstick is not the only vehicle that Kiki rides. Kiki rides a variety of vehicles throughout the film. She spends the night in a freight train car right after she leaves, and most vividly, she rides a bicycle (the engine part of a human-powered airplane) with her boyfriend, Dragonfly. Let's take a look back at what the scene was like.

Kiki is not good with cars?

At the request of a kind-hearted old lady, Kiki delivers a pie to her granddaughter. But when she receives the pie, her attitude is cold. On the way home, Kiki gets caught in the rain. Kiki has been invited to a party by Dragonfly, but she is late and soaking wet, so she is completely depressed and even catches a cold.
Kiki goes to visit Dragonfly at his house to take care of the room he is renting to Kiki. Kiki is shown a bicycle with a propeller attached, which is a human-powered airplane with only the engine part completed, and Kiki straddles the back seat. The bike floats off the ground and drops into a green area near the beach.
After this thrilling experience, Kiki laughs out loud and becomes completely at ease with the dragonflies. However, when the dragonfly's friends show up in a car and the old lady's granddaughter is among them, Kiki is mortified and walks away from the dragonfly ......, a scene with many ups and downs. Moreover, Kiki goes home in a bad mood and loses her magic.

Dragonfly was also riding a bicycle when he first meets Kiki, but the bicycle in this scene is essentially an airplane, only without wings. Dragonfly is riding toward an airship that has crash-landed on the beach, so the higher the speed of the bicycle, the closer it is to the sky, giving the scene a floating sensation.
The bicycles on which Kiki and the dragonfly float are a car passing by on the road. Whenever the dragonfly tries to avoid an oncoming car, the bicycle floats in the air. It can be said that every time Dragonfly's bicycle floats, it is getting closer to Kiki's broomstick. The two must have become friends because they shared the experience of floating in the air on their own.

And the dragonfly friends who make Kiki uncomfortable appear in a large automobile. This automobile is the same one that Dragonfly and his male friend were riding in near the beginning of the film. In a way, it acts as a switch to offend Kiki.
To begin with, Kiki does not get along well with cars. When she first arrives in town, she is almost hit by a double-decker bus, and she is surrounded by cars on the roadway, putting her in danger. When she went shopping, she almost ran into a passenger car as she ran out into the street. For Kiki, who can fly freely on a broomstick, cars on the ground are a troublesome opponent. Let's take a closer look at the relationship between cars and Kiki.

Flying broomstick and ground-crawling automobile

After Dragonfly goes to see the airship with his friends, Kiki walks home alone. The road by the sea was constantly busy with cars, and she had to turn off the road and walk over the rugged rocks to avoid them.
But it was not as if she was forever incompatible with automobiles. To cheer Kiki up, her friend Ursula invites her to a cabin in the woods, where Kiki is disheartened by the loss of her magic. First, Ursula and Kiki take the local bus. Next, they hitch a ride on a hitchhiked truck and finally arrive at the cabin in the woods.
On the way back, Kiki rides alone in the passenger car that Ursula hitched. What kind of conversation did Kiki have with the driver who gave her a ride? Having lost her magic, Kiki has no means of transportation except by car. She had belonged to a fantasy world where she could ride freely in the sky on a broomstick, but by riding in a car that runs on the ground, in other words, by experiencing the same things as ordinary people, she seems to have begun to interact directly with society.
The car that comes to lure the dragonfly is driven by a man, and there are three girls in it. One of them is the grandson of an old woman, and the play never tells us how she and Dragonfly know each other. It is not easy to know who is related to whom and where. That is the nature of society. For Kiki, the car may be the complexity of society itself.

Now, Kiki is flying across the sky astride a deck brush to save a dragonfly that has been suspended in midair by an airship.
Kiki, who has just arrived on the scene, has no choice but to give way when a fire truck coming from behind tells her, "Move aside, you little girl. However, after straddling the deck brush, she passed the police car at once, flying just above the ground. Kiki, who had been giving way to the car, overtook it just as she regained her true power.
More than the freedom of magic, "The Witch's Delivery Service" depicts the process of a young girl's clumsy self-realization as she comes to terms with the world. When we look at "Kiki's relationship with cars," we are reminded of this fact.

(Text by Keisuke Hirota)
(C) 1989 Eiko Kadono, NIHONMA, GN