Kiki's Delivery Service

Chaudhuri, Ritu Sen (2018). Kiki and the ‘girl’: A moment of reading between Deleuze and feminism. Deleuze and Guattari Studies, 12(4), 486-504.

"The essay reads as a moment of alliance – a moment of reading of two disparate things together. The event of alliance remains inspired by Gilles Deleuze's theorisations of becoming. This marks the coming together of unrelated things – one into the fold of another – without being subordinated in the process. It reads an anime, Kiki's Delivery Service (Hayao Miyazaki, 1989), with Deleuze and Guattari's writings on ‘the girl’ (A Thousand Plateaus, 1987) – where the girl represented as ‘real’ in a fantasy meets the girl written as a metaphor in a theoretical intervention. This inflicts a sense of violence, of abstraction, to both the figures of ‘girl’. On the one hand, Miyazaki's work, removed from the discourse of anime, is placed under a feminist scrutiny, while on the other hand, Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the ‘girl’, extracted from the logic of the original texts, is reinserted into feminist renditions. The two readings are coordinated by a specific intention. This is to imagine the feminist potential of the ‘girl’. Occasionally the two works appear to talk to each other, yet sometimes they stand incommensurable. The texts animate each other without being subsumed by each other – inhabiting and following the movements to trace the other as fields of singularities which cannot be reduced to fixed identities or parallels. This transversal act of reading does not aim at coercing the Deleuzian notion of the girl upon Kiki, but rather looks forward to the conversations generated between the two narratives."

Roedder, Alexandra (2014). The localization of Kiki's Delivery Service. Mechademia: An Annual Forum for Anime, Manga and the Fan Arts, 9, 254-267.

Norris, Craig (2013). A Japanese media pilgrimage to a Tasmanian bakery. Transformative Works and Cultures, 14.

"A small bakery in regional Tasmania, Australia, has been reimagined as a pop culture destination by Japanese tourists who claim it is the inspiration for a key location in the anime Kiki's Delivery Service. To understand how and why Japanese tourists have located this bakery in the imaginary world of Kiki, two processes are explored: the media pilgrimage, where fans bridge their ordinary reality and enter the special media world, and the media scaffold, where Kiki becomes a way to interpret the world around them."

Ellis, Jonathan (2010). The art of anime: Freeze-frames and moving pictures in Miyazaki Hayao's Kiki's Delivery Service. Journal of Japanese & Korean Cinema, 2(1), 21-34.

"This article analyses one of Miyazaki Hayao's (1941) most loved but least scrutinized anime films, Kiki's Delivery Service (1989). In addition to placing the film within the context of Miyazaki's career, the article looks in particular at the ways in which the animation industry itself is one of the main subjects of the film. Attention is paid to intertextual references to earlier Miyazaki films such as My Neighbor Totoro (1988) as well as to Kiki's relationship with other filmic and literary traditions, specifically the Bildungsroman and Knstlerroman."

Matsumoto, Miki, Yamauchi, Kanako, Tanaka, Misa, & Kato, Tadahiro (2010). Role-play Therapy as Treatment for Anorexia Nervosa using the Script from the Hayao Miyazaki Animated Movie Kiki's Delivery Service (Majo no Takkyuubin). School Health, 3, 1-6.

"A 14-years-old schoolgirl having suffered from anorexia nervosa for a year was referred to our counseling room by her family doctor. She was admitted to the hospital suffering from weakness, fatigue, and amenorrhea as a result of marked weight loss over a six-month period. She was a high achiever who pushed herself to excel in every facet of school life, falling short only in her social relationships. She put pressure on herself to excel in every academic subject and was worn out, leaving little time for friends, and ultimately leading to social isolation. The constant pressure led to anorexia. Using role-plays based on KiKi's Delivery Service (KDS) scripts (Hayao Miyazaki animated movie, "Majo no takkyuubin"), we helped her discover her personal style and develop her interpersonal social skills. Our role-play model proved to be a successful treatment for anorexia nervosa and we recommend these methods for patients with anorexia nervosa needing a more developed sense of identity."

Bryce, Mio. (2006). Fashioning a spiritual self in a rational and technological society: Cultural dichotomies in the Japanese animation Kiki’s Delivery Service. CREArTA: the International Journal of the Centre for Research and Education in the Arts, 6, 45-56.

Lane, Michael (2004, March). White moments and Miyazaki's Kiki. Triumph of the Past

Elwood, Kate (2003). A comparative analysis of requests in Majo no Takkyūbin and Kiki's Delivery Service. The Cultural Review, 22, 77-100.