Kiki’s utopian counterfactual

It was interesting to find out that when designing the world for Kiki’s Delivery Service, Studio Ghibli director Hayao Miyazaki had in mind a fantasy of a twentieth century Europe where the world wars had never happened. His counterfactual exercise manifested mostly in the urban look of an older Europe, or a sort of generically-looking central Europe, everywhere and nowhere, with cobblestoned winding streets, stone bridges, tramways and charming avenues, not a single modernistic building in sight and the preserved beauty of a turn of the century European architecture equipped with modern amenities that I would date roughly equivalent to end of fifties.

It’s a very utopian counterfactual. Is it even possible to imagine that everything would have gone just as it had to go so that war was avoided over and over again? The forking paths of possible futures for each avoided war surely would have created other pivotal political moments on the brink of new conflicts. Still, just as the addition of witches to the story as a normal, unsurprising thing among this world’s inhabitants (this normality, a staple of magical realism), we can follow along with this vision as a pure game of fantasy.

I look at Kiki’s male counterpart’s attempts at building a plane propelled by a pedal dynamo that powers a helix, and I think about what technology would have looked like in such a counterfactual fantasy. Did Miyazaki leave jet planes out of the picture because he considered the possibility that without the technological scramble of war they would not have happened? Then I think about atomic bombs. Would they have been invented?

I find it somewhat inspiring to think of this world’s technology, possibly less potent than what we gained through these gargantuan conflicts, but perhaps they would be more artisanal, more experimental, more decentralised with a less developed military industrial complex. Maybe it would be a technology that was birthed not out of arms races, precautionary defences, post-war and cold-war security, but birthed from humbler incentives, awash in peace.

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