Starting today for the next several months Cineplex is having a Studio Ghibli Anime Series added to their monthly screenings. Today and Wednesday August 2 they are playing Kiki’s Delivery Service. Today’s showing will be dubbed in English but Wednesday’s show will be in the original Japanese with English subtitles.
The next film in the series is Castle in the Sky and it will be played August 27 in English dub and August 30 in Japanese with English subtitles.
For the those who don’t know Studio Ghibli is an animation film studio from Japan that was co-founded by one of the greatest animation directors of all time Hayao Miyazaki. Miyazaki has been making movies since the 1970s to even this day (he’s retired a couple of times only to come out and make another movie). His films are unlike any American animated movies. The art is beautiful and the stories are filled with hope.
Kiki’s Delivery Service is about a young witch named Kiki who decides it’s time for her to leave home and her caring parents and to go out into the world and find a new town to live and practice/help people. It’s tradition. She finds a small city near the coast and tries to settle there. A kind pregnant woman who owns a bakery offers her a job and living quarters and soon Kiki gets the idea to start a delivery service using her flying broom to deliver things to folks all over town.
There’s no evil bad guy, no antagonist to thwart just a young witch trying to help people with her business. It’s a great change of pace from say the standard Disney movie and if you have never seen a Hayao Miyazaki movie before this is a great one to start with.