Watching the film Kiki’s Delivery Service made me think about sadness in youth. The story begins with a young witch called Kiki who, having turned 13, follows her sorcerer village’s tradition of leaving home to set up shop as a witch somewhere in another place.
With the use of Kiki’s magic to start a delivery service as a background, the story is one of coming of age. The young girl is experiencing the independence of leaving the nest for the first time. She realises that if she is sad and doesn’t want to leave the house, no one will come and tell her to do so. By not leaving her bed and facing what upsets her, her problems won’t disappear as if by, ironically enough, magic.
It made me think of those first experiences when striking out on your own. Those days of personal incertitude when the first missteps may feel like the end of the world. When that sting of seeing your first attempts at building something on your own torn down are so fresh and new, that at that moment it feels that you irremediably screwed things up. When it feels it is not worth trying anymore, that it is too hard and something is wrong with you.
The thing is that sooner or later, everyone needs to go through those first failures. The gravity of the situation, where you need to pull yourself up and do something, is magnified by the fact that you don’t know what crossing the threshold of the light at the end of the tunnel feels like.
There is no real motivation that can surpass that slump until you’ve tasted the invigorating satisfaction of extricating yourself from a predicament all on your own. Until then, you won’t be able to foresee in the horizon the possibility of repeating that experience as a motivating reward. Once you lived it, once you victoriously came through to the other side, every previously overblown feeling of tragedy will seem a comparatively small price to pay for proving your capabilities once again.
In the scene that begins the third act of the film, everything seems to be falling into place for Kiki. Her delivery service is thriving and she is finally warming up to a local boy called Tombo, with whom she seems to have a special chemistry. It all goes wrong in her head when Tombo’s friends arrive and Kiki, intimidated by them, suddenly becomes distant and walks away from a puzzled Tombo. She immediately regrets her behaviour and plops down on her bed filled with angst, weeping about how she ruined everything.
Eventually, Kiki regains her confidence through a series of acts and by the end of the film she visibly reaches new levels of well-deserved joy that couldn’t have happened hadn’t she experienced the contrast of hitting those lows (as subjectively worse they were than in reality).
The film’s coda wraps up with a voiceover reading a letter that she sends to her parents to update them on how she’s doing away from home.
“Dear Mother, dear Father, how are you doing? Jiji and I are fine. Everything at work is falling into place. I’m gaining confidence. There are still times when I feel sad, but all in all I sure love this town.”
She feels sad sometimes, there is no escaping that feeling, but the triumphs that she has experienced remain as proof that, all in all, things can be great.
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