YMMV / Kiki's Delivery Service

• Accidental Aesop: While the message Hayao Miyazaki intended with Madame's granddaughter is that people aren't always going to be grateful for what you do, the fact that Madame's granddaughter sends Kiki on a brief downward spiral thanks to her rude behavior also sends a message that one should be kind to others and that small acts can have far-reaching consequences. If Madame's granddaughter had just spared a bit of kindness towards Kiki and let her in to escape from the rain instead of slamming the door in her face, then everything that goes wrong with Kiki in the second half (such as her getting sick and losing her magic) likely wouldn't have happened. It helps that the importance of showing love and kindness to others is a recurring message in several of Miyazaki's other films.
• Adaptation Displacement:
  • Very few people outside of Japan realize that the Miyazaki film is actually based on an illustrated novel by Eiko Kadono, which was published four years prior to the film. This is largely thanks to the fact that the Miyazaki film was released in most countries outside of Japan years before the book did. Even in Japan, the popularity of the Miyazaki film far eclipses that of the original novel.
  • As a result of this, when the live action adaptation was released in 2014, many would wind up confusing it as an adaptation of the Miyazaki film as opposed to the book, which led to many criticizing the film for making "changes" from the Miyazaki film, when many of these "changes" are actually because the film was attempting to be Truer to the Text to the original book unlike Miyazaki's film, which was more of a Pragmatic Adaptation. It has gotten to the point that at least one official Blu-ray release◊ would incorrectly state the film to be based on the Miyazaki film as opposed to the book.
• Audience-Coloring Adaptation: Due to the popularity of the Ghibli film, many subsequent works and adaptations (such as the 2014 live action adaptation) tend to portray Kiki's hair as being short as it is in the Ghibli film as opposed to long as it is in the novel. Even some versions of the novel outside of Japan have depicted her with short hair, such as the British version.
• Awesome Art: Well, it's a Hayao Miyazaki movie, so this is expected, but in particular the ending scene with Kiki on the borrowed broom is incredibly animated.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Kiki and the two elderly ladies see the chaos unfolding on TV when heavy winds send the blimp flying out of control. Barsa is getting a little too much entertainment out of this, like she's just watching a movie. That is, until Kiki spots Tombo being lifted away....
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • Kiki and Jiji's life in Koriko post-film tends to be a popular subject in fanfics related to the film.
  • Given that Kiki, her mother, and the senior witch are the only witches seen in the film, this has led fans to wonder about the existence of other witches in the film's world.
• Fanon:
  • While the film never makes it explicitly clear as to what Kiki's "special skill" is, it is universally agreed by fans that her special skill is flight, given that she starts a flying delivery service which she proves very competent at, flying being something she is clearly passionate about (given that Ursula compares it to an artist's craft, and how heartbroken Kiki is when she breaks her mother's broom), her flying to save Tombo at the end, and flight in general being a recurring motif across most of Miyazaki's films. Since flight seems to be a shared trait of all witches, it's usually thought that there's something about Kiki that makes hers special. It should be noted that in the original book series, Kiki eventually finds her special skill as a potion and medicine maker like her mother (though given that the rest of the books aren't adapted or released in English, not many are aware of this fact).
  • While it's not remotely touched upon in the film proper, many fans (especially the LGBT Fanbase) like to interpret Ursula as a lesbian.
• Faux Symbolism: Because of some of the parallels Ursula makes comparing her art to Kiki's magic, magic can be seen as an allegory for art, with Kiki losing her ability to fly being similar to art block (or how her earlier illness and depression prevents her from doing her craft), and the joy of regaining one's desire to do art. This was actually the intended message of the film, as Hayao Miyazaki describes in The Art of Kiki's Delivery Service.
• First Installment Wins: While the novel did get several sequels, the first novel is undeniably the most well known and is the one both adaptations are based off of. Even people outside of Japan who are aware of the first novel are likely unaware that sequels even exist at all. Especially since unlike the first novel, the sequels have yet to be released outside of Japan.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • Fans of the film tend to be friends with fans of Little Witch Academia due to both anime starring plucky young witches in training and both anime using magic as an allegory for art. It helps that Kiki's Japanese voice actress — Minami Takayama — plays Professor Nelson in LWA. Unsurprisingly, there is a good amount of crossover art between the two.
  • There's a kinship between fans of the film and fans of Studio Ponoc's Mary and The Witch's Flower, due to both works starring young teenage witches and Mary and the Witches Flower having been made by former Ghibli alumni.
  • While the Ghibli fanbase is pretty interconnected overall, Kiki fans tend to be very close friends with fans of My Neighbor Totoro due to their similar grounded and Slice of Life tones and both being amongst the first Ghibli films to be released and dubbed outside of Japan, leading to a bit of shared nostalgia between the two fanbases. It also has this with Whisper of the Heart, as both films share similar themes of finding one's own place in the world and the struggle of creating art.
• Gateway Series: For a lot of 80s and 90s kids, this was their introduction to Studio Ghibli's catalog, and perhaps even anime in general.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The film was a hit in the US due to Disney (through Touchstone Pictures as their first G-rated film) distributing the video and casting celebrities such as Kirsten Dunst and Phil Hartman as the characters, and sold over a million copies in its' first week on video.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Considering the police officer's resemblance to Lupin III, it becomes all the more funny that his seiyuu would later go on to voice Lupin's Sitcom Arch-Nemesis Inspector Zenigata.
• LGBT Fanbase:
  • Osono's husband Fukuo has gotten a good amount of bara fanworks.
  • The film in general is popular with lesbians, but Ursula seems to be the most well-loved character among them, due to her caring, independent, and free-spirited nature.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Kiki falling into her bed, dead tired◊ has become a stock GIF.
  • Some fans have noticed that Tombo looks like a younger Griffin McElroy, culminating in this.
• Moe: Kiki is just too adorable with her cheerful attitude, clumsiness, and eagerness to learn. Witches don't come much cuter than her.
• My Real Daddy: While the original story was done by Eiko Kadono, far more people are familiar with Hayao Miyazaki's adaptation of the story. Even those who have read the original book have often expressed that, as charming as Kadano's original story was, Miyazaki's interpretation is more definitive, as it has a more cohesive narrative and fleshes Kiki out into a more realistic and relatable character compared to her book version. Quite tellingly, Miyazaki's take on Kiki would go on to influence how Eiko Kadono wrote her in later books, and even the Truer to the Text live-action adaptation takes influence from Miyazaki's interpretation of Kiki, both in appearance and personality.
• Narm: Viewers might be less impressed by Ursula's painting◊ than the characters are.
• Nightmare Fuel: The entire sequence with the blimp crashing into the city with Tombo hanging on for dear life. Anybody who gets anxious about heights is bound to be tense during these moments. The scene itself, being what it is is also likely to evoke recollections of the Hindenburg disaster.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • The witch that Kiki encounters and chats with during her flight only appears once in the entire film and doesn't even have a name (the credits only call her "Senior Witch"), and yet, she is quite popular amongst fans. It probably helps that she's the only seen witch in the film besides Kiki herself and her mother.
  • Madame's granddaughter only appears in a single scene where she rudely brushes Kiki off after the latter went through hell to deliver one of Madame's herring pies. Fans consider her an incredibly memorable Hate Sink, and some even consider her the "true villain" of the film (jokingly or not).
• Periphery Demographic: The film is quite popular amongst artists, due to how much Kiki's struggles with magic resonate with their own struggles at art. Particularly when it comes to burnout and having the fun of it getting sucked away when it becomes more of a job than a hobby.
• Questionable Casting: Critics of the live-action version say the main lead was a little too old to convincingly play a 13-year-old.
• Subbing Versus Dubbing: Not the only Ghibli dub to receive such an atmosphere (Castle in the Sky and My Neighbor Totoro also qualify), but many viewers can't seem to decide whether the Disney dub is a charming, entertaining experience or a watered down travesty of a great film. Purists strongly claim it is the latter (often stating that the Japanese version or the Carl Macek-produced Streamline dub are the only ways you should watch the film), but there are many fans of the dub; the fact that the Disney dub was the final film role of Phil Hartman before his death tends to add fuel to the fire. The German dub gets a similar, if ever so slightly less extreme, treatment.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: "Starting the Job" (which plays when Kiki sets off for her first delivery in the original version) is essentially "Spring" from Vivaldi's Four Seasons with a slight key shift.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Many fans were not pleased when the 2010 re-release of the English dub removed most of Phil Hartman's ad-libbed lines, saying that it's disrespectful to his memory, as this was his last role before his death. Similarly, much handwringing ensued when fans found that Sydney Forest's songs were replaced with the original Japanese tracks. When Disney later released Miyazaki's post-Kiki movies on Blu-ray, none of their English dubs had any dialogue (such as Spirited Away's last chat between Chihiro and her dad) removed; non-American Netflix branches also restored the ad-libs and Forest songs to Kiki.
  • On the other hand, some fans are upset that the dub made such significant changes to begin with, and prefer the post-2010 version of the dub for restoring the film closer to its initial Japanese version; no other Ghibli film had been edited for its dub as much as Kiki was. There's a subset of fans who prefer the Streamline dub over the Disney dub for similar reasons. In particular, the final line of the Disney dub — Jiji saying "Kiki! Can you hear me?", which was originally just Jiji meowing — is incredibly controversial, as it effectively changes the closing message of the film. Fans are torn which ending is better: the Bittersweet Ending of Kiki growing up without Jiji, or the happy ending of Kiki fully gaining her powers back. It doesn't help that Miyazaki has given conflicting answers on if she could understand him again in the Japanese version or not.
  • Also, the audio engineers who edited the dub's audio made a noticeable error, as they did something to the dialogue in the mix, resulting in everyone, if they got too high in volume, to sound like they're talking through fans all the time. The master for the GKIDS/Shout! Factory rerelease — still missing the '98 dub — and HBO Max somehow made this worse by making this more likely to happen even when the characters weren't loud, which GKIDS said they didn't notice before putting their release out somehow.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Both English dubs changed coffee to hot cocoa, as during the '90s, English speakers generally didn't see it as acceptable for children like Kiki to drink coffee. This is both a culture-based example and a time-based example — it's always been fine in Japan, and nowadays it's much more commonly acceptable in the west.
  • Ursula and Kiki get around by hitchhiking, and at one point they're picked up by an old man who doesn't know them. The intent is totally innocent, but western audiences more keenly aware of "stranger danger" may find it a bit uneasy. Disney's dub addresses this by adding extra lines where the old man recognizes Ursula and treats her like a close friend, and the same idea is kept in the 2010 recut.
• The Woobie:
  • The Madame. She's rich, but she lives alone with no-one but her housekeeper for company, and it is implied that her spoiled granddaughter never comes to visit her, what with her lack of appreciation of her grandmother's efforts to make her something nice for her birthday. To make matters worse, one can't tell wether the Madame is blissfully unaware of this or if she is aware but just chooses to ignore it.
  • Kiki is only thirteen when she leaves home as per tradition, and arrives in a town where she has difficulty fitting in. Her delivery service ends up taking up so much of her time that flying no longer brings her the joy and freedom that it used to, soon leading to burnout.
• Woolseyism: When Disney did their English dub, they decided to add some extra dialogue and music to scenes that originally didn't have either, on top of changing Jiji's personality to be more sarcastic, leading to a slightly different experience than the original. That said, the film still works in spite and many critics and fans like and even prefer the changes made and additions added by Disney, to the point where backlash occurred when Disney re-edited the film in 2010 to remove those additions.

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