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Kiki's Delivery Service · This Film is Lit

• 0:04
  Speaker A: This film is lit, the podcast where we finally settle the score on one simple question. Is the book really better than the movie? I'm Brian and I have a film degree, so I watch the movie but don't read the book.
• 0:15
  Speaker B: And I'm Katie. I have an english degree, so I do things the right way and read the book before we watch the movie.
• 0:22
  Speaker A: So prepare to be wowed by our expertise and charm as we dissect all of your favorite film adaptations and decide if the silver screen or the written word did it better. So turn it up, settle in, and get ready for spoilers. Because this film is lit, we each need to find our own inspiration. Kiki sometimes it's not easy. It's Kiki's delivery service and this film is lit. Hello and welcome back to this film is lit, the podcast where we talk about movies that are based on books. We're here for Katie's birthday month episode talking about Kiki's delivery service, our second or third studio Ghibli film. Second because we did Howl's Mountain, we.
• 1:24
  Speaker B: Did house moving Castle. I think that's the only one we've done.
• 1:28
  Speaker A: That's what I mean.
• 1:28
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:29
  Speaker A: So I think it's our second. Anyways, we have, I think, every no guess who this week, but every one of our other segments. So we will jump right in. If you have not read or watched Kiki's delivery service recently, we're gonna give you a brief summary in. Let me sum up. Let me spray. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.
• 1:48
  Speaker B: This is the movie summary sourced from Wikipedia, so take that as you will, Kiki. A young witch decides to go out on her own, which all young witches must do, taking her talking black cat Jiji with her. Her mother insists that she take her mother's old reliable broomstick keke flies off into the night, searching for a new town to settle into. She encounters another witch and her cat, who she finds pretentious. But they cause Kiki to wonder what her special skill is. Keiki finds the town of Coraco and accidentally flies through traffic, causing disruptions. She is approached by a policeman, but a boy named Tombo helps her escape. Keiki looks for a place to live and work in her new town. She finds a bakery owned by Asono and her husband, who are expecting a child. Asono invites her to live in a room above the bakery. Keiki opens a business delivering goods by broomstick known as the witch delivery service. Her first delivery is of a small stuffed toy of a black cat that looks like Gigi along the way, she is caught in the wind. And ends up in a forest filled with crows. Which attack her. Causing her to lose the toy. They come up with a plan. In which Jiji pretends to be the toy. Until Kiki can retrieve the real one. She finds it in the home of a young painter, Ursula. Who repairs and returns it with the help of a dog. Kiki successfully retrieves Jiji and replaces him with the stuffed cat. The next day, Tombow gives her an invitation to visit his aviation club. However, she gets busy with her deliveries. And when she gets caught in a thunderstorm on her way back, she decides not to go. She falls ill, and Ahono cares for her until she recovers. Ahono secretly arranges for Kiki to see Tombo again. By assigning her a delivery address to him. Kiki apologizes for missing the party. And Tombow takes her for a test ride. On the flying machine he is working on. Fashioned from a bicycle. Kiki warms up to him. But is intimidated by tombos friends. Kiki becomes depressed. And discovers she can no longer understand Jiji. She has also lost her flying ability. And is forced to suspend her delivery business. Ursula then visits Kiki and asks if she can go to her house. She agrees, and the two spend time together there. Ursula determines that Kiki's crisis is a form of artists block. And then suggests to her to find a new purpose. So that she can regain her powers. While visiting a former customer's house. She witnesses an airship accident. On television, Tombo is seen trying to help tie the dirigible to the ground. But a gust of wind pushes the aircraft away from him. Clinging to the rope, Keiki rushes to the scene. And asks to borrow a broom from a local shop owner. She regains her flying power and rescues tombo. She recovers her confidence, resumes her delivery service. And writes a letter home. Saying that she and Gigi are happy.
• 4:48
  Speaker A: All right. There was a brief summary. As I said, no guess who this week. So we're gonna get right into my questions. Or I'm gonna ask. Was that in the book?
• 4:59
  Speaker B: Gaston, may I have my book, please?
• 5:01
  Speaker A: How can you read this? There's no pictures.
• 5:04
  Speaker B: Well, some people use their imagination.
• 5:06
  Speaker A: So my first question is that is, in the film, this appears to just be a universe. Where witches are kind of a normal, accepted part of the world. Nobody in the film really bats an eye at the fact that she can fly on a broom. Or that she has magical powers or whatever. And at the beginning, we see her mom helping some lady in their town. Making a potion for her. So it just seems like a part of this universe. And the towns have resonant witches because that's where Kiki is setting out to find her place to set up and be a witch. And I wanted to know if that was a similar world that existed in the book. Witches just kind of being part of the world.
• 5:45
  Speaker B: Yes, it is similar in the book. There's a little more background information in the book. Towns having resident witches and also witches existing in general. In the book. We're told that it used to be much more common, but that witches are kind of dying out.
• 6:03
  Speaker A: Okay. Yeah. I don't know if that's alluded to in the movie.
• 6:06
  Speaker B: I didn't feel like it was at all.
• 6:08
  Speaker A: No. Okay. So then we are introduced to Kiki specifically, who is our main character, as hinted at by the title of the film. And her best friend in the film is a black cat, a tiny black cat by the name of Gigi. And I wanted to know who also talks in the film, at least up until a point, which we'll get to. Actually, I don't know if I have a question about it. Point being, I have stuff about it. Yeah, cat talks up until a point. Does Kiki in the book have a talking black cat companion?
• 6:37
  Speaker B: Yes, she does.
• 6:38
  Speaker A: Okay. I mean, that's a pretty standard witch thing.
• 6:42
  Speaker B: So.
• 6:42
  Speaker A: Falls right in line with the genre. So, as I said, kiki has to go out and make her own way in the world, which we find out, are told in the film that this is a thing that all witches do when they turn 13. At some point, they go out on a full moon is when they leave. The night they leave, and they go out into the world to kind of find their own way, basically. And I wanted. There's. The way this is set up in the film is pretty funny, is that she realizes there's gonna be a full moon, that I think she might hear it on radio. I think the radio says it or whatever. And then as she's. She's telling her mom she's gonna leave. And then as she's getting ready to leave, her dad is, like, outside packing the car with, like, camping equipment. And she, like, opens the window and yells out at her dad, I'm leaving tonight, but I gotta. I'm getting. Going to be a witch or whatever. And he's like, but our camping trip that we've been planning. And she's like, nope, bye. And I wanted to know if that specific element came from the book. Cause that cracked me up that she bails on her dad this camping trip with her family that they've been clearly planning for a while for an event which also has a set. We know when the full moons occur.
• 7:52
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 7:53
  Speaker A: So I wanted to know if that came from the book.
• 7:57
  Speaker B: It does not. Not that specific thing. There's no mention of a planned camping trip. In the book, she does decide kind of abruptly to leave on the very next full moon, but in the book, that's still five days away. When she decides that's not, like that night.
• 8:12
  Speaker A: Yeah, I will say, as much as I'm kind of joking about how it's very kind of crappy to her dad or whatever, it's very indicative of the kind of decisions that 13 year olds make. So it's very that kind of impulsive, last minute decision that a 13 year old would make. So it's not that it's not within character or makes sense. It's just you're like, oh, you feel bad for her dad.
• 8:37
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 8:38
  Speaker A: So as she leaves and she ventures out into the world, and she's now flying to go find a town to settle down in. And as she's flying out, she comes across another witch who is flying next to her, pulls up beside her and starts talking to this other witch. And this other witch is kind of stuck up and doesn't really want to associate with Kiki because Kiki is, like, new or whatever, and the switch is very established and very smug. But this, at one point, I don't remember exactly what comes up, but Kiki asks her a question, and she says something about how she knows something because her specialty is that she can see the future or is like a fortune teller, I think. Yeah, fortune teller. And Kiki is like, oh, I don't know what I do, or whatever. And it kind of becomes clear that witches have their own. They kind of specialize in something. We saw her mom at the beginning seems to specialize in potions, and she mentions that she hasn't had a chance to teach Kiki any of the potions, which you've had 13 years.
• 9:35
  Speaker B: What are you doing?
• 9:35
  Speaker A: Okay, sure. But do all witches in the book, do they have a thing that they specialize in? Is that part of the world building?
• 9:45
  Speaker B: Technically, it is, but in the book, it has more to do with the art of witchcraft fading away. A lot of different skills are becoming a lost art because there's not as many witches as there used to be. Whereas in the movie, it seems more like they just choose something to focus on, like something they're good at.
• 10:06
  Speaker A: Yeah, that that is what it feels like. So when you say that it has to do with witches fading out, what does that, how does that relate to them having specialties?
• 10:16
  Speaker B: So in the book, the thing that her mom is the things that her mom knows how to do are to make potions. Well, actually in the book, it seems like just one specific potion, honestly, and then fly. And she teaches Keiki how to fly. But Keiki is kind of bad at doesn't have a lot of interest in learning to make this potion. So it's this kind of gradual, like the loss of these skills.
• 10:48
  Speaker A: Okay. So it's less that they specialize in something and more so that they literally have, they list.
• 10:54
  Speaker B: They literally have been like losing all these arts over the centuries.
• 10:58
  Speaker A: Interesting. Yeah. I don't know if there's any implication, again, similar to the idea that. I don't think the movie really alludes to the idea that witches are like a dying breed or whatever.
• 11:09
  Speaker B: No, I didn't seem like it.
• 11:10
  Speaker A: Yeah. Okay.
• 11:12
  Speaker B: I think the closest that the movie gets to that is when she arrives in the town and they're like, oh, nobody's seen a witch here for a long time.
• 11:20
  Speaker A: That is true. There is that line. Yeah. About them not having seen a witch in a while. And it's a pretty big town to be. It's like a big city to be fair. So I guess that you could extrapolate from that. That probably, yeah.
• 11:32
  Speaker B: But other than that, the movie, I feel like, doesn't really imply the same, like, background lore that the book has.
• 11:38
  Speaker A: No, not at all. Absolutely not. So as Kiki arrives in this large town, which we talked in the prequels, probably based on like Stockholm or some town in Sweden, basically. And she flies into town. She ends up getting, flying into some traffic and getting, almost getting into an accident. And the local police officer comes over and is going to give her like write her up for almost causing an accident on her broom. But luckily she's the police gets distracted by some kid yelling or somebody yelling, oh, somebody yelling that somebody stole like a purse or something. And the police runs off. And then this is where we're introduced to tombow. He comes running around the corner on his bike and it's like, ha, I did a good job, didn't I, getting you out of that? Because she's like, oh, thanks, or whatever. Is Kiki nearly arrested immediately upon arriving in her new town? And is she saved by Tombo, the town nerd?
• 12:33
  Speaker B: No, none of that happens in the book.
• 12:35
  Speaker A: Okay. So as Kiki starts to kind of establish herself in town, or I say establish. Figure out what the heck she's gonna do in this town. She's, like, looking for a place to stay and doesn't. Kind of runs out of. Doesn't really have much luck. She goes to, like, a hotel or something. I can't remember.
• 12:50
  Speaker B: She tries to get a room at a hotel. Yeah.
• 12:52
  Speaker A: And they're like, we need your information and stuff. And she's like, oh, whatever. And then she leaves. Didn't think this out very well again, which means kind of this. It's a coming of age story. It's about all the mistakes you make as a child or as a young adult. Not a young adult, I guess a young. A teenager or whatever. And she. Because she's 13, right?
• 13:14
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 13:15
  Speaker A: And the. So. But she ultimately stumbles upon this bakery. And at this bakery, as she's kind of sitting there, like, just moping on the street, this woman leaves with a stroller. And then a few seconds later, or a few minutes later, the owner of the bakery walks out. This woman. Osana. Is that her name?
• 13:35
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 13:36
  Speaker A: Walks out, and it's like, oh, no. That lady forgot her pacifier for her baby. That baby's gonna be crying all the way home. And this is, like, the inciting incident that makes Kiki realize that she can deliver things. She's like, I'll take it to her. And she flies down and takes this pacifier to this woman, who is, like, at this point, like, way, like, blocks and blocks away.
• 13:58
  Speaker B: Yeah, she was the fast walker.
• 14:00
  Speaker A: Yeah. But apparently before. So I wanna know if that's, like, the inciting incident. But more importantly, does that. Was the baker woman going to shut down her bakery with customers inside for, like, 15 minutes to go run down this woman to give her a single pacifier that she left? Because that is customer service. I mean, and terrible customer service at the same time.
• 14:26
  Speaker B: It's both, presumably longer than 15 minutes. Cause she's heavily pregnant.
• 14:30
  Speaker A: Yes, that's true too.
• 14:32
  Speaker B: It's gonna take her one time.
• 14:33
  Speaker A: It's gonna take her forever to get there.
• 14:34
  Speaker B: To get there and get back.
• 14:34
  Speaker A: Cause when we see her, she's, like, down a hill and, like, walking around it. Like, she's, like, half a mile away by the time she sees.
• 14:41
  Speaker B: And still moving.
• 14:42
  Speaker A: And still moving. Yeah. It would have taken her forever to catch up. It's like, well, it's great customer service for that one lady and terrible customer service for everybody else in the bakery. Although I guess her husband can't man the cash register for a minute. And also, I think, part of what we're doing there is because she's pregnant. She's very sympathetic to the mom, and, like, blah, blah, blah. So it's like a fun moment. But I just wanted to know if that's how that all played out in the book. Cause that cracked me up in the film.
• 15:09
  Speaker B: So that is the inciting incident. It's slightly different. In the book, Kiki overhears the husband and wife who run the bakery talking about taking the pacifier, and the husband doesn't want to do it. He's like, it's fine. It doesn't matter.
• 15:27
  Speaker A: Is it reasonable?
• 15:28
  Speaker B: And the wife is like, well, if you're not gonna take it, I'm going to. And that's when Kiki's like, pardon me. I can take it.
• 15:36
  Speaker A: Okay, fair. That's fair. You know? Yeah. The mom, she understands the.
• 15:42
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 15:43
  Speaker A: Or she can. I guess they understand she hasn't had her child yet.
• 15:46
  Speaker B: She's probably having anxiety thinking about this exact thing happening when she has her child.
• 15:52
  Speaker A: So she's overly sympathetic to this issue, for sure. So after this, Kiki basically ingratiates herself at the bakery and starts running her delivery service out of the bakery where she's going to. She has people call, and she will deliver things around the city via her broom, which seems like a super. I don't know if other witches have thought of that or not, but it seems great.
• 16:18
  Speaker B: It seems like a great super novel. Like, have something delivered by broomstick. I would do that all the time.
• 16:25
  Speaker A: I mean, despite novelty, just incredibly efficient and quick. Yeah, yeah. And, like, would take. It takes her. No, it would take her, like, no time to deliver things and basically no effort.
• 16:38
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 16:38
  Speaker A: Like, you're just flying around. It doesn't seem super difficult. So. Yeah, I don't know. But one of her first, I think her very first job that she gets after the pacifier is this woman calls and wants a toy. Yeah. Somebody calls and wants and wants a toy delivered to this little kid who lives with his mom or whatever in this big house, and she's flying out there to take it to him. Take this toy. And the toy, it's like a toy cat, like a stuffed black cat that just happens to look very similar to Gigi in a bird cage for some reason, which is very interesting. But she's taking this out there, and then as she's en route, she gets attacked by a bunch of crows because she falls down into their tree, and.
• 17:23
  Speaker B: She gets caught on the wind and then falls.
• 17:26
  Speaker A: Yeah. And then the crows get mad at her for like, stumbling into their domain and chase her away, and she ends up losing the toy, and the crows won't let her get back in to get it. So she comes up with a plan that she's going to come back later and sneak in and get it, but that she needs to deliver the toy right away. So instead, what she does is she has Gigi pretend to be the toy. It's a very clever ploy. Pretend to be the toy so that she can deliver that and then come back later and swap the toy with Gigi. And so this all goes down and works surprisingly well, honestly. But ultimately, when she does get back with the. After she gets the toy and gets back to the house to swap it, there's this old sheepdog that has befriend, I say befriended, I don't know if that's the word, who doesn't say anything or really do much of anything. He just sleeps for the most part. But he seems to be up on what is going on here. He seems to have some sort of dog intuition that allows him to know what is transpiring here, because he's able to tell for sure that it's a real cat and not a thing. But he's very kind to the cat. He just lays down and sleeps next to it. And then when Kiki shows up, he carries Gigi out and gives it to Kiki and then takes the toy back inside. And I wanted to know if there was a friendly dog that helps her on her first delivery because I loved how chill that dog was.
• 18:56
  Speaker B: So there's no dog. Everything leading up to that is pretty much the same as it happens in the book, we're pretty close, but in the book, the little boy really likes his stuffed animal, quote unquote. And he's actually cuddling with GG in bed, asleep when she comes back to get him, which I did think was super cute, but I prefer the movie. Adding in the helpful dog with dog intuition.
• 19:22
  Speaker A: He just knows. He's just like, yep. And then when he. Cause she just shows up and he just knows to go outside and just gives her the cat, and then she's like, here, will you take this? He's like, yeah. And I just. I don't know. I love that was one of those little details that I thought worked great in this movie that I didn't question at all why that dog was like, yeah, let's do this. Just seemed right for that dog. So I mentioned Tombow earlier that she, we were introduced to Tombow, who's this little kid who kind of follows Kiki around and boy, does he ever follow her around. And I wanted to know one if he is as similarly interested in Kiki as he is in the film, where he's just constantly pestering her and following her around and wanting to hang out with her, and if Kiki is equally disinterested in him as she is in the film, despite his constant advances, he's the worst. I did not like Tombow.
• 20:16
  Speaker B: Tombow is actually barely in the book, which is very preferable to me as I am a certified tombow hater and always have been. I can't stand tombow.
• 20:27
  Speaker A: He's pretty annoying. To be fair. I do appreciate their little moment later where he's like, oh, yeah, I'm sorry that I was like, I am kind of annoying. Or, I don't know, he says something like that about how his mom tells him not to be so weird or something.
• 20:43
  Speaker B: Yeah, but then he goes on to continue being really annoying.
• 20:47
  Speaker A: Does he though? Really? Yeah, I don't know if after that he does really. He just invites her to come hang out on the blimp and she gets.
• 20:54
  Speaker B: But then after that he keeps calling her.
• 20:57
  Speaker A: Remember, he calls her one time, doesn't he?
• 20:59
  Speaker B: Yeah, but she tells him not to call again.
• 21:02
  Speaker A: Yeah, but does he after that?
• 21:04
  Speaker B: Not that we see, I guess.
• 21:06
  Speaker A: I don't know if he's super annoying after that. That one phone call is very funny. But anyways, just in general. Yeah, I also was not a fan, so.
• 21:14
  Speaker B: Yeah, so in the book, he is in the book not as much as he's in the movie. And they get off to a rough start in the book. More on that later. But they eventually end up becoming friends. But like I said, he's really not in the book all that much. Yeah, I did see, when I was looking at the author's website, when I was doing research for the prequel episode, I saw in the synopsis of some of the later books in the series that Kiki and Tombo eventually have a romance. And I'm curious how much of that was already planned out or if it was inspired by this movie. I don't know.
• 21:50
  Speaker A: Yeah, who knows? So speaking of Tombow, at one point she, this is after she, something happens and she, oh, she misses her party.
• 22:04
  Speaker B: Yeah, she misses the party and gets.
• 22:06
  Speaker A: Sick in the rain because of the delivery. This is after she delivers to the old ladies. We're jumping ahead a little bit and then. Yeah, and then she ends up and she misses Tombow invited her party. She misses the party, gets sick. Sick for a couple days, and then is kind of out of it. And then she feels weird, bad about blah, blah, blah. And so Osana is like, hey, take this delivery. In kind of an attempt to, like, cheer her up. She's like, take this delivery. And it ends up being a delivery to tombow. And then he's like, hey, let me show you the sweet bike I made. And I wanted to know if he has trying to invent, like, a flying bicycle in the film. And I wanted to know if that came.
• 22:46
  Speaker B: Yeah, this is a bike with a propeller.
• 22:49
  Speaker A: He's in the aviation club. That was the party that she missed. Was that an aviation club party? Which is a thing, I guess, like.
• 22:56
  Speaker B: A ripper in good time.
• 22:57
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 22:58
  Speaker B: His weird flying bike machine is not in the book. And despite my tombow hate, I actually don't mind this in the movie. He is obsessed with aviation in the book as well. And I thought that this was a pretty good reflection of that interest.
• 23:13
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I thought it was fine. It's fun. Little fun, little scene and thing. And then it makes for a good little ending where he actually creates a flying bike in the post, like, during the credits outro thing at the end of the movie. One of my favorite lines in the whole movie. So after they've been experimenting with this bike or whatever, they end up on the beach, and they're kind of hanging out just sitting because I think the bike crashed or. Yeah, yeah. And so they're just, like, sitting there. And tombow's friends roll up in their car. I guess they have an older friend who drives a car around.
• 23:42
  Speaker B: Yeah, I guess so.
• 23:44
  Speaker A: Cause they roll up in this old beat up car that they all hang out in all the time, and they're all getting ready to. The zeppelin is in the distance, or dirigible or whatever they call it, and they're going to go, like, on a tour of it or something. And tombow runs over to them, and they're like, oh, we're going on the dirigible. And he turns around and he yells at Kiki. He's like, hey, we're gonna go tour the dirigible. You should come. And she just yells back from a distance, thanks, but I don't want to. And then just turns and walks away, which is incredible. And I wanted to know if that particular interaction came from the book, but also if Kiki, because at this point, we're kind of realizing she has some social anxiety with these other people particularly, and doesn't really want to hang out with them in a social setting. So one, that specific reaction or interaction. But two, just kind of Kiki's general social anxiety. Does that come from the book?
• 24:42
  Speaker B: So this specific scene is not in the book. And the book does occasionally show Kiki feeling kind of self conscious, a little unsure in her interactions with people. But the level of social anxiety that's in the movie is not something we see in the book.
• 24:59
  Speaker A: Very funny. It's so good. I cracked me up so much. It just, I don't know if I've seen so perfect of an illustration or, like, a representation, representation of that kind of person, which I'm a little bit that person sometimes, but I know lots of people that way. And it's just, it's very, it cracked me up so much. I thought it was so funny. But after this, because of this interaction and what has gone on, she's very embarrassed that she didn't go hang out and she doesn't know what to do. And it's that thing we all kind.
• 25:35
  Speaker B: Of deal with where she's feeling like there's something wrong with her.
• 25:38
  Speaker A: The fact that she didn't have want to go do this. Yeah. It makes her depressed, and she falls into a depression. And there's a great shot in the movie where she falls face first onto the bed like a plank. It was very funny. But she falls into this depression, and she actually loses the ability to fly and the ability to understand Gigi. And I wanted to know if that came from the book first, that specifically her falling into depression and losing her abilities.
• 26:07
  Speaker B: So it does not, she doesn't at any point, fall into a depression and or lose the ability to fly. She doesn't, in this book, lose the ability to talk to Gigi. However, there is a textural basis for this because we're told early in the book that once a witch grows up, she loses the ability to understand her cat companion. And I think also in the synopses of the later books that was mentioned as well, that she can no longer talk to Gigi. But other than that, none of that actually happens in this book.
• 26:47
  Speaker A: Okay. But during this moment of depression, this is the phone call you mentioned earlier that is fantastic. Where she's on the phone and we just cut to it, and tombow is just rambling on and on. I think about the dirigible or something, I can't remember. And he's, like, just going on and on. And she's just sitting there like blank faced listening. And then just after he stops for a second, she just says, please don't call me anymore, and hangs up the phone, and it is so funny. It's so good. And I wanted to know if that interaction came from the book.
• 27:17
  Speaker B: It's not from the book. It is the response that tombow deserves and see. But I just feel like, I feel like he's being not cool in this situation.
• 27:33
  Speaker A: I don't know if he's aware.
• 27:34
  Speaker B: I don't think he's probably not. But I think the thing that bothers me so much about tombow, other than his persistence in pursuing her despite her clearly not wanting to be pursued, is that he sees that she can fly. And from that, extrapolates that she must have the same interest in aviation as he does. But that's not what flying is for Kiki. It's something she can do. Imagine if you were just out walking and some guy came up to you and assumed that you were interested in the mechanics of walking, and you were a big walker, and you loved to talk about walking all the time.
• 28:25
  Speaker A: Yes, that's fair. That's fair. But also, I feel like you're dismissing the fact that tombow is clearly autistic and is just oversharing his freaking hyper fixation with Kiki. That is what is occurring. He just assumes that she, because she flies, she's just like, oh, you must also love flying. This is the thing I love. I don't think there's any malice in it. I think it's a very, I don't think there's any malice to genuine childhood thing.
• 28:52
  Speaker B: But I still don't like tombow.
• 28:55
  Speaker A: That's fair. I also don't, again, I liked him more as the film went on, which I think you're supposed to. I also found him very annoying initially, and he never comes around to a character I loved or anything, but he got less annoying. But I did enjoy the fact all of the time. She just kind of shuts him down. It's still fun. It's still enjoyable because he is kind of obnoxious.
• 29:20
  Speaker B: I do like, I haven't really said, but I do like the changes to the story that are being made in the movie here with, like, the second lacked low point being. Kiki lacks confidence, and that messes with her really badly. Is it's so appropriate for a coming of age story that it hurts?
• 29:41
  Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's very good. So that's not what transpires in the book. Does the book have like, a kind of a low point?
• 29:47
  Speaker B: No, no, not really.
• 29:49
  Speaker A: Because the book, I think I read during the research for the prequel that the book, is it more like episodic?
• 29:56
  Speaker B: Like, kind of, like vignette or whatever.
• 29:58
  Speaker A: Like, so some of the little things that happen in the book are in it, but it doesn't have as much of an overarching kind of.
• 30:03
  Speaker B: No, not really.
• 30:05
  Speaker A: Okay, interesting. So, well, at this point in the film, as I said, kiki's fallen in this depression, doesn't really know what she wants to do. And then this is where she is reunited. I don't even remember how they link back up.
• 30:18
  Speaker B: Ursula comes to see her.
• 30:20
  Speaker A: Yeah, I know, but I just, I can't remember why. Or, like, just kind of just decides to, I don't think I've mentioned his character yet, but she met Ursula earlier when she was during the woods scene with the crows or prior to. I can't remember. But she met Ursula earlier, very briefly when she was trying to get the toy back, I believe.
• 30:39
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 30:40
  Speaker A: And at this point, Ursula then shows back up and talks to Kiki and is like, hey. And Kiki can tell that Kiki is very clearly depressed and is going through some stuff and invites her to come stay with her. And I wanted to know if Ursula the forest lesbian helps Kiki get over her depression. You can't tell me that's not.
• 31:00
  Speaker B: I'm not gonna tell you that's not. And I've got thoughts on it later. There is an artist character in the book who lives in the woods, and we do meet her when Kiki is trying to retrieve the stuffed cat toy. And she also later paints a picture of Kiki and Gigi flying, which we.
• 31:17
  Speaker A: Do see in the film.
• 31:18
  Speaker B: Which we do see in the film. But she's not a main character, and she isn't in the book beyond that scene. I don't think she even has a name in the book, actually. I don't remember that. I recall her having a name. Obviously, this is better in the movie.
• 31:31
  Speaker A: Yes, we'll talk more about it, but, yeah, it's, I enjoy that a lot. And she's, like, an older. She seems older. Like, probably, like, 1819 or something like that. Like, late teens probably would be my guess. It's hard to tell in a cartoon, but that would be my guess. Just based on their size discrepancy.
• 31:48
  Speaker B: Like, close enough to Kiki's age to still, like, be able to relate to.
• 31:52
  Speaker A: She's not, like, a full blown adult. She's not, like, in her late twenties.
• 31:55
  Speaker B: Or something, but she's old enough to be, like, a mentor.
• 31:58
  Speaker A: Yeah. And to be through the. The early. Yeah.
• 32:01
  Speaker B: The pump. Being an early teenager.
• 32:04
  Speaker A: Yeah. So, and this works Ursula is able to talk to her and kind of talk her through her depression and basically tells her it's like, similar to an artist to a, like a creative block. Yeah, like a writer's block or an artist block or whatever. And that she needs to find her purpose for flying again or her reason for flying, and then that will let her do it. I will say, I don't know. This isn't really a question I have here. I don't know what the movie lands on, her new purpose for flying. I don't think it necessarily needs to have a distinct purpose for why she was flying from before. But the movie kind of implies that she needs to find this new purpose to be able to fly again. And obviously, we have the big climactic action scene, which we're about to talk about here. But so initially, she's flying to deliver things because she wants to have a job and make money and do that and all that ever. And then she stops. She kind of falls into depression because she doubts herself, like, socially and just kind of gets down on herself for not fitting in and not really understanding that. And then Ursula is like, you need to find your purpose and what inspires you to fly kind of thing, like comparing it to art or whatever. And I'm not exactly sure what it is that then causes that to happen. She finds a reason to fly is to be like a superhero. But is that the reason? Because then she just goes back to delivering things again, I guess. You know what I mean? Like, it's. To me, I'm not. I don't know if it. I think it still works in the sense of, like, from a less strict, like, these plot points connect ABC in terms of, like, what Ursula says is directly what fixes her or whatever. I think it works less in that sense and more in a sense of just, like, having gone and talked to somebody who commiserates with her and, like.
• 34:00
  Speaker B: You know, feels seen by somebody.
• 34:02
  Speaker A: Yes. Feels seen by somebody and, like, acknowledges her feelings and, like, kind of talks her through it. She then is able to regain kind of her confidence and whatever. But I don't think she gets, like, a new purpose.
• 34:14
  Speaker B: You get what I'm saying? I would tend to agree. I have always read it more as her getting her confidence back. Right.
• 34:21
  Speaker A: And I think that, yes.
• 34:22
  Speaker B: And I do wonder, and I would be interested to hear if we have any listeners who can chime in here if there's maybe some translation. Translation maybe not necessarily a mistranslation, but I do think it's a very subtle shade of difference?
• 34:39
  Speaker A: Oh, yes.
• 34:40
  Speaker B: Between, like, this idea of, like, getting your new, finding her confidence with the skill and, like, finding a purpose with the skill.
• 34:47
  Speaker A: And that could be a thing that very. Because those are the kind of things that those kind of words and ideas and terms in languages can vary.
• 34:55
  Speaker B: Very subtle, non concrete ideas.
• 34:57
  Speaker A: Yes. And, like, the words we use to express them can be very subtly different, like confidence. And, you know, I'm stumbling to think of a perfect example. But there are words that are very similar in English that mean almost the same thing, but don't really. And if you were to translate one word, you know what I mean? That could easily get a little lost in translation going from Japanese to English. I could totally see that being the case. And also just, again, it doesn't really matter. It totally works fine as is. It was just something I was kind of thinking about this time, watching it. I don't really know if she finds a new purpose, because, again, if she had gone on then to be like, I'm gonna go save people or something, and, like, you laugh, but, like, that is what spurs her into action. And so if she had decided, well, I don't want to deliver things. I want to help people or something like that.
• 35:49
  Speaker B: So I'm gonna join the fire department.
• 35:51
  Speaker A: Or something like that, that would be a thing where I go, okay. There's a very direct correlation from what Ursula talked to her about and what she is now doing, whereas, as it is, it's more of, like, she just goes to some talk therapy, and that makes her feel better and kind of get her confidence back. And then so she's able to. And then this big moment really, like, helps solidify that. And then she's able to go back to doing what she did before, basically, but, like, with more confidence. And, like, that's, again, that's a perfectly fine thing. And I think that is a journey that a lot of us go on over our lives numerous times.
• 36:26
  Speaker B: Maybe the boost in confidence helped her realize that this was her purpose.
• 36:30
  Speaker A: Yeah. And that's also totally, like, again, it's not that I don't think it. I think it works totally fine. It was something a very little nuance to the storytelling that I noticed this time that I was like, I just wanted to talk about, I guess, and see what you thought. But it wasn't a question that I had. So getting to the climactic action scene, the thing that happens here at the end of the film is Kiki ends up going to. She stops by the old lady's house briefly for something I can't remember.
• 37:00
  Speaker B: She stops. But they want to give her a cake.
• 37:02
  Speaker A: That's right. They want to give her a cake. And so they give her this present, and she's very touched by it. And then during. While this is happening, the other old lady who lives there, who is, I think, supposed to be like, the maid or, like the.
• 37:12
  Speaker B: I think she's caretaker. I prefer to interpret them as elderly lesbians, but I do think we're meant to see that she's, like, a caretaker of some sort.
• 37:21
  Speaker A: Yeah. I would agree with your read of the film as well. But the other lady, who isn't the Maine woman, is watching the news, and there's a dirigible docked downtown, and a wind gust caught it, and it is, like, blowing away. And they have this footage of all these people trying to hold onto the ropes and whatnot. And I wanted to know if that happened in the book first.
• 37:47
  Speaker B: It does not. There's not a dirigible in the book at all.
• 37:50
  Speaker A: Okay. Two points about which actually doesn't surprise me that that's a very Miyazaki thing.
• 37:58
  Speaker B: Flying airships and dirigibles, where it's, like, almost steampunk.
• 38:02
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 38:03
  Speaker B: Not quite.
• 38:04
  Speaker A: Yeah. Well, and this one is just like an actual, straight up, normal, like, zeppelin, dirigible, whatever you want to call it. It's not like one of the more fantasy ones like we see in some of his other movies. It's a pretty straightforward, normal zeppelin. But two things. One, people didn't know this. This blew my mind. Cause I just found this out, like, a couple weeks ago. Not related to this movie at all. But when I saw the imagery in the film, I was like, oh, my God. I've seen this before. This is based on a real event that happened in the US in 1927. The USS Los Angeles, which was a zeppelin that we had, was tied somewhere on the east coast, and it got caught by wind, and it flipped up vertical. And the photo on Wikipedia, if you go to the USS Los Angeles and scroll down, there's a photo of that event happening. Looks identical to the shot you see of the dirigible in this. Standing up vertically at one point, very clearly, was the inspiration for this scene, that event, by the way, just fun fact. In that event, in real life, nobody was hurt or injured or anything, and the zeppelin ended up being fine. They were able to, like, guys were, like, climbing up it to, like, weigh the tail down, like, literally. Like, it's crazy. But nobody got hurt. Nobody got intermittent. I say nobody got hurt. I don't know. Nobody got killed. And it was able to, like, fly fine the next day, but it made for some wild pictures. And secondly, during this, while they're watching the newscast, that old lady who watching the newscast, I don't remember her name, is so amped about potentially watching people die in a dirigible accident. She is, like, salivating over the drama of this dirigible accident.
• 39:42
  Speaker B: I love that old woman. She's my hero.
• 39:44
  Speaker A: It's very funny, but also kind of crazy. But I guess at that age, she's like, fuck, who cares?
• 39:49
  Speaker B: Whatever.
• 39:51
  Speaker A: So I guess we'll have to see. It would have to be something other than this dirigible rescue. But we get this incredible moment in the movie which I had completely forgotten about. I have seen this movie once and I remembered a lot of it, but I didn't remember all the little details. And this big climactic moment that is awesome and seems way ahead of its time, kind of honestly, like, it seems like maybe a little bit of the blueprint for some later comic book stuff. I mean, obviously this came out in 89 and there were other comic, but, like, I don't know, something about this. I was like, there are. Zack Snyder watched this moment and other directors and stuff watch this moment. But when she's going, she sees all this happening and she wants to go help. Especially, particularly because tombow is hanging by a rope from the dirigibles. It floats over the city and she wants to go try to rescue him. So she borrows a broom, like a shop broom from a shopkeeper, and she's getting ready to fly and she walks out in the street in front of all these people and she's standing there on the broom and she crouches down and it all goes into slow mo.
• 40:58
  Speaker B: Yeah, it goes silent.
• 40:59
  Speaker A: It goes silent. And it looks like slow motion, the animation equivalent of slow motion. And she crouches down and she can tell she's concentrating. And then she just whispers, fly, and then launches up into the air. And I'm like, this is Superman taking off. This is literally exactly that. It's sick. It's super cool. And I wanted to know if it came from the book again. Obviously, it would be a different scenario.
• 41:25
  Speaker B: But does not come from the book. I unashamedly adore the climax of this movie. Everything going silent and the whispered fly and then her launching off into the air. Oh, my God. I vaguely remember watching this movie for the first time, probably around ten years old. And this was the moment that made me fall in love with this movie.
• 41:50
  Speaker A: Oh, absolutely. This is the reason kids love Dragon Ball. Like this kind of. It's the same. It's like same kind of thing. And like all those, you know, it makes sense. I say comic book movies now. I think about anime does this all the time too. So then that would make sense. But, yeah, it's just. It's such a quintessential, like, superhero anime moment that feels almost out of place in the movie. Kind of like. Cause apart from that, it's mostly just kind of like a fun.
• 42:16
  Speaker B: I don't know, but it's a cool reminder that she is kind of a superhero.
• 42:23
  Speaker A: Exactly.
• 42:24
  Speaker B: The movie treats her as very normal for the most part, but she's got witch powers.
• 42:32
  Speaker A: She can fly. Yeah. No, I agree. It's awesome. And if had I seen this movie as a kid in that moment would have been burned into my brain, I would have. Yeah, I've been obsessed with it. Absolutely. It's fantastic. And then, so you said none of this comes from the book. So maybe there's something. I don't know, maybe there's something else similar. But Kiki in the film manages to save tombow just in time. He falls off the rope he's hanging on to, but she's able to come down and grab his hand just before he hits the ground in a very dramatic moment and save him and then drop him onto a fireman. The little trampoline thing that they in movies and tv shows catcher things. And I wanted to know if she manages to save tombow in the nick of time in the book, so she.
• 43:16
  Speaker B: Doesn'T ever have to save tombow in the book. But I do think that the climax of the movie where she saves him may have been inspired by a scene in the book. There's a vignette in the book where Kiki goes to the beach and she ends up having to rescue a kid who's on a float being pulled out to sea because there's high winds. Like, the wind kicks up, and it's kind of like a similar visual. Like, she's, like, flying out and, like, circling, but having a hard time, like, getting down low enough to get to him because of the wind. But she does end up, like, being in this one.
• 43:52
  Speaker A: She's having trouble because she's having trouble controlling the broom.
• 43:54
  Speaker B: That's part of it in the book too. She's flying on a different broom at the. More on that later.
• 44:00
  Speaker A: Yeah, she's flying on a different room. I also interpreted it as she still not quite.
• 44:04
  Speaker B: Yeah, she's still trying to get that confidence back.
• 44:06
  Speaker A: She's still working on getting that back. So she's still a little shaky, but yeah, the combination of all those things made it tough, but yeah, no, it's a. It's a fun climax. It's very good. It's very enjoyable. And so she succeeds. Succeeds. She saves tombow, much to Katie's chagrin. And they live happily ever after. She writes a letter home saying, hey, go stay in Stockholm. You guys have fun. I'm gonna live on my own as a 13 year old bai. But yeah, it's good. It's a great ending. So those are all my questions for was that in the book? But I do have one thing I want to talk about briefly in lost in adaptation.
• 44:48
  Speaker B: Just show me the way to get out of here and I'll be on my way.
• 44:53
  Speaker A: Yes, yes.
• 44:54
  Speaker B: And I want to get unlocked as soon as possible.
• 44:57
  Speaker A: So we make a joke about how I read this in every movie we watch, but I this time feel like I cannot be alone. And I wanted to talk about this isn't really a lost adaptation, but I wanted to see if it was an interpretation that you were aware of or that you knew because you have seen this movie more than me. And the circles you run in on Tumblr and stuff, or at least used to, may felt like maybe this may have come up. I don't know. But I was kind of taken aback this time where I feel like there's a. An analysis or a read on this movie where there's an interpretation, where it's less about Kiki, which it's definitely this is what the movie about. And I don't want to, when I say that there's a read or like an interpretation of this movie, I mean through like a very, through a queer theory lens. Through a queer theory lens and not from like an actual textual, like, this is what the movie's doing lens because it's very clearly not what the movie is doing. But I feel like there has to be some writing, some ink has been spilled about the idea that this movie is actually probably could be about Kiki realizing that she's not into boys. And that is what spurns her fall into depression because it happens right after all of her interactions with tombow. We see her constantly not wanting to really interact with them, blah, blah, blah. And it's obviously just a kid thing, but she's not in a tombow. And he keeps trying to come onto her and she's just not interested. They have their interaction briefly and they like, sit on the beach and talk. And then he invites her. What you could see is a date of, like, hey, come on this tour with them. It's with other people, whatever. But she turns that down because she doesn't know how she feels about it. And this kind of spirals her into a depression. And then Ursula, the wiser, older forest lesbian, shows up and helps her realize, takes her to her cabin in the woods and helps her realize, and I don't mean that in a sexual way, just in, like a mentor way. Yeah. Helps her realize why she's different and how she's different and that who her true self is. And this is what kind of spurs her into her, brings her back and reignites her passion and her confidence and all that sort of stuff is kind of like coming to terms with her true self and realizing that, yeah, she's maybe not into boys. Anyways, I wanted to know if you've heard this before. If this is a thing I just made up, I will say this. I was googling, trying to see, like, while we were, after we watched, I tried to Google to see, and I did one Google search, and I didn't see anything. But what I did find was the top result was, like, a tweet or a Reddit post or something that was very popular. That was about how Ursula made a lot of young women realize that they were into women. Apparently, Ursula was, like, one of those catalyzing moments for a lot of, of women. So, anyways, your takes, that is definitely.
• 47:43
  Speaker B: A read that I have heard before. You did not make that up, surely.
• 47:47
  Speaker A: I felt like there's no way I could have.
• 47:48
  Speaker B: No. Personally, I am more inclined to read it as a general coming of age story and not necessarily focused on sexuality. But I do think that a queer theory reading of this is an incredibly valid read. I think there actually is a lot of textural evidence for it. And either way, I do read Ursula as a lesbian, it would appear.
• 48:13
  Speaker A: Yeah, it would. You know, for playing on stereotypes, it would seem. Yeah.
• 48:19
  Speaker B: And now, correct me if I'm wrong.
• 48:22
  Speaker A: Too, but I will say I also agree with you that I I think it reads much better as a coming, just a general coming of age story, and it all tracks that way. And it's very beautiful in that way. And I, and so, yeah, I agree with you that I am also more inclined to read that way. That was just something that kind of, yeah.
• 48:38
  Speaker B: But again, that does not invalidate a queer theory read at all.
• 48:43
  Speaker A: Multiple different queer theories or other kind of, you know, readings of the film, for sure.
• 48:47
  Speaker B: But I also wanted to bring up, I don't have this in my notes. But when I was looking for a quote to use for the intro on my life on IMDb, one of the quotes on there, and I wonder if this is from an older english dub, maybe, because I don't think this is in the movie that we watched last night, there's a quote, and Kiki says to Gigi, oh, she's a painter. She wants to paint a picture of me. And Gigi says, naked. And Kiki goes, Gigi, on my life?
• 49:26
  Speaker A: No, that's probably one of. So. Cause one of the main things we heard that did get changed was added jokes. Like, added jokes for specifically the Gigi, which was played by Phil Hartman in the film. So that would, that would, yeah, I.
• 49:39
  Speaker B: Like, I'm wondering if that. I want to try to, like, find a VHS copy of this movie.
• 49:44
  Speaker A: Find it on YouTube.
• 49:45
  Speaker B: Yeah, maybe.
• 49:46
  Speaker A: Honestly, I bet that is what that is, though. I bet that was a punch up joke, you know, for lack of a better term, that then when they re went back, they, they were like, yeah, yeah.
• 49:56
  Speaker B: I felt related, though. No, absolutely. Because I was, like, scrolling through, I was looking for a quote, and I was like, I don't remember that.
• 50:02
  Speaker A: That is another one of the moments that makes me the, like, pain her thing. All of that stuff is just coated in this kind of very sapphic. Yes.
• 50:12
  Speaker B: Another thing that I wanted to bring up while we're on this topic is that there actually is a moment in the book where Kiki meets a girl who's about a year older than her and spends a solid paragraph plus describing how pretty and cool and mature this girl is. And it did make me question. I was reading it and I was like, am I reading Kiki's first bi panic right now? Let me, let me read to you.
• 50:43
  Speaker A: Sure.
• 50:44
  Speaker B: Kiki hurried down from the second floor and opened the shop door to see a girl standing alone in the doorway. Dark brown curls gently framed her face, and she wore a pretty pale pink sweater. Gleaming white boots went all the way up to the knees of her slender legs. The girl almost seemed to be floating. Keke was so awestruck by her welcome. Kiki was excited and could hardly speak. This was the first time she had a customer around the same age as her. When the girl saw Kiki, she inhaled sharply, lowered her eyes, and stumbled over her words. I, uh, um. Do you need something delivered? Kiki asked, having composed herself a bit. I heard that this shop can deliver anything. Are you the delivery woman? The girl's tense face smiled and she cocked her head. Yes, and I do a thorough job. No need to worry. I see. The girl nodded, her dark eyes flashing, and she seemed to purposefully slowly bat her eyelashes. I want you to deliver something for me. But it's a secret.
• 51:51
  Speaker A: Yep.
• 51:53
  Speaker B: I mean, I feel like I'm not reading too much into that.
• 51:56
  Speaker A: No, I would agree. You were absolutely nothing. Alright, that was all I wanted to discuss for lost in adaptation. It's time now to get into all the stuff that Katie thought was better in the book. You like to read?
• 52:10
  Speaker B: Oh yes, I love to read.
• 52:13
  Speaker A: What do you like to read?
• 52:16
  Speaker B: Everything. I do think that the movie is correct to start kind of in media res ish, with Keiki deciding abruptly that she's going to leave that night because that is when the actual story starts. But I appreciated getting to know a little bit more about Keke and her family in the book and getting to know them a little bit better. I also thought that the witch lore in the book was really interesting. This idea that witches are a dying breed. I guess I thought that was super fascinating. It didn't really go anywhere. I didn't feel like the book did all that much with it, but I thought it was really interesting.
• 52:58
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 52:59
  Speaker B: I mentioned earlier there's a scene where Kiki is on the beach and she has to rescue a kid using a broom that's not hers. That's because there's a scene in the book. This is when she meets Tombo and he literally steals her broom. When she's chilling on the beach, he steals it and replaces it with another broom. And then not only does this kid almost drowndehenkhe from that, GG also almost drowns because he's also on the float floating out to sea. And then not only does tombow steal the broom, he takes it and tries to fly on it and breaks it. And you would think that this would be something that's better in the movie because it isn't in the movie, but I really felt extra justified in my tombow hatred after reading it. So it goes in better in the book.
• 53:50
  Speaker A: There you go.
• 53:53
  Speaker B: A little thing that I thought was really nice was that the baker's husband also sets up like a whole office set up for Kiki in the barn or whatever. So she has her bedroom, but then he also sets up a little desk for her and puts a big map up on the wall. And all this we do get a little illusion.
• 54:11
  Speaker A: And maybe you have a note about this, but they make a little sign for this.
• 54:14
  Speaker B: Yeah, it looks like it's made out of bread.
• 54:15
  Speaker A: It looks like it's baked.
• 54:16
  Speaker B: Yeah. I thought that was super cute, too. The book says that tombow ends up helping Kiki. We're told that he helps her with figuring out how to carry heavy or oddly shaped things while she's flying on her broom. But we only actually see him do this once, and I thought it was kind of dumb. So she has to deliver a painting for the. The artist who lives in the woods, and she's not sure how to carry it. And I was like, he comes to help her because he's all interested in aviation or whatever, right?
• 54:53
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 54:53
  Speaker B: I was thinking that he was gonna, like, use it as, like, a rudder or something because it's like a big flat. Like, you know, I was like, okay, that kind of makes sense. But then his idea was to tie balloons to it, like weather balloons or just regular balloons, just like helium balloons. I'm realizing now, as I'm talking about this, this should have been a better.
• 55:13
  Speaker A: I was wondering. I thought it might be a. I thought it might be the same justification as before. It's like, you wish this was in the movie. It's just another example of how stupid tombow is that he's supposed to tell.
• 55:22
  Speaker B: You know what? I'll take that explanation. Get out of here.
• 55:26
  Speaker A: I mean, if you had enough balloons, it would work. Yeah, it would just take quite a few.
• 55:31
  Speaker B: I just thought it was dumb, like. And it didn't demonstrate his knowledge and interest in aviation?
• 55:38
  Speaker A: No, not at all. Because literally, that's just, like, the first thing. That's, like a child. Like, tie a belief. Like, the first pie, a balloon.
• 55:45
  Speaker B: Do it. That's what Winnie the pooh does.
• 55:47
  Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. It's not a novel. Like, you have an interest in aviation kind of idea.
• 55:55
  Speaker B: So the excerpt that I read earlier about Kiki meeting the slightly older girl, that story is that she delivers a gift to the guy that this girl has a crush on. And it's like a secret. She doesn't want him to know who it's from. And there's also a poem that this girl wrote that goes with it. And as Kiki is going to deliver this, she's like, I have to know what this poem says. So obviously, she cracks open the envelope and immediately loses the poem and then has to try to recreate it from memory. Oh, no. And it ended up being pretty inconsequential. Nothing really comes of that story. But I thought it could have been a fun thing for the movie to incorporate. I mean, it is pretty similar to the, like, losing the cat.
• 56:45
  Speaker A: Yeah, it's different. And fun. Yeah, it could have been fun, but.
• 56:48
  Speaker B: I thought I was like, that could have been fun. I felt like that could have worked.
• 56:52
  Speaker A: In the ties in with the coming of age thing of, like, the. Yes.
• 56:55
  Speaker B: And, like, feeling uncomfortable in your interactions with people.
• 56:59
  Speaker A: Yes. And relationships and, like. Yeah, exactly.
• 57:01
  Speaker B: There is a scene in the book where Kiki flies up really high to help a woman hang a bunch of laundry to dry that I thought was really cute.
• 57:09
  Speaker A: Flies up? Really? What do you mean?
• 57:10
  Speaker B: She was, like, holding the end of the laundry line and flying up and up and up as she hangs more and more laundry. And then she flies on a circle to dry it all. Again, inconsequential, but it was cute.
• 57:23
  Speaker A: That would have been a good thing to show, like, in the end credits.
• 57:26
  Speaker B: Yes. That was a great end credits scene. I totally agree.
• 57:30
  Speaker A: Maybe it was. I mean, there was a lot of things that happened, and I don't remember all of them during those credits, but, yeah, that would have been good.
• 57:37
  Speaker B: I forgot that Kiki and Ursula hitchhike in the movie.
• 57:40
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 57:42
  Speaker B: And then they're, like, in the truck with this guy, and Ursula's, like, upset and offended that he thought she was a boy.
• 57:48
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 57:49
  Speaker B: What a weird little scene.
• 57:50
  Speaker A: She's like, you ever seen boys with legs like these? And he's like, I don't know what he's like. I don't know.
• 57:55
  Speaker B: Please stop talking. I thought that the book, one thing that I liked in it was that it had a stronger theme about a mother daughter relationship, which I thought was really nice, especially within this universe. It seemed to me, anyway, that witchcraft is passed down mother to daughter.
• 58:19
  Speaker A: I assumed that in the movie.
• 58:20
  Speaker B: Yeah. So I thought that was really nice and worked well. And at the end of the movie, we just see Kiki write a letter home. At the end of the book, she actually does go home and visit and then realizes that, but she doesn't need to be at home anymore.
• 58:37
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 58:38
  Speaker B: Which I thought worked really well.
• 58:39
  Speaker A: Yeah, that would be nice. Yeah, for sure. All right. That was all the stuff Katie thought was better in the book. It's time now to find out what she thought was better in the movie. My life has taught me one lesson, Hugo, and not the one I thought it would. Happy endings only happen in the movies.
• 58:56
  Speaker B: This is just a little moment, but I really love the group of girls that are, like, cheering her on when she leaves home. I thought that was super cute. There is another witch that she meets in the book as she's traveling, and I believe her talent in the book or her thing that she knows was also fortune telling. But I thought it made a lot of sense in the movie to have her be kind of a bitch, which she's not in the book. She's pretty nice, and they just chit chat. But I thought this made a lot of sense to kind of get her started off on the wrong foot with everything and, like, go into it feeling.
• 59:43
  Speaker A: Kind of on edge.
• 59:44
  Speaker B: On edged. Yeah. Cause she sets out feeling very confident and then she immediately gets taken down a pig by this girl.
• 59:52
  Speaker A: Yes. And I think it's very good because that helps set up the entire trajectory of the rest of her journey of, you know, feeling unsure of herself and not being confident and all that. And it's because, yeah. Because like you said, she starts out, she's like, gung ho, ready to go.
• 1:00:05
  Speaker B: Yeah. She's like, I'm ready.
• 1:00:07
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:00:07
  Speaker B: I'm gonna go out and be the best witch there ever.
• 1:00:09
  Speaker A: Was a very real experience that a lot of us have. I'm sure almost everybody has gone through where you have that thing where you're excited to go do something and then you see you run into somebody who's, like, really good at the thing.
• 1:00:20
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:00:20
  Speaker A: Or has it been who's, like, been doing it longer and you're like, oh, I'm an idiot. I don't know what I'm doing. Yeah.
• 1:00:27
  Speaker B: I thought that having her land on the train and hitch a ride to go to sleep was really fun to get out of the storm. I also thought that was potentially a fun nod to a scene in the book that doesn't make it into the movie, partly because it doesn't make sense, which is one that she has to land on a moving train to get some instruments off of it.
• 1:00:51
  Speaker A: Wow, just a train heist.
• 1:00:52
  Speaker B: Yeah, basically. I like the little scene where she goes in and tries to get the room at the hotel and the guy at the counter is like, well, are your parents with you?
• 1:01:05
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:01:05
  Speaker B: And she's like, nevermind.
• 1:01:07
  Speaker A: Yeah, just leave. Yeah. Didn't think that one through.
• 1:01:13
  Speaker B: I really love the baker's himbo husband. Yes, I adore him.
• 1:01:18
  Speaker A: He's great.
• 1:01:19
  Speaker B: There's a brief scene early on where Keke encounters a group of girls walking down the street, and she's like, oh, I wish I had something pretty to wear. I just have this ugly old dress. And I really appreciate that tiny little scene because there's so many multiple layers of things going on. If you contrast this group of girls to the group of girls who cheered for her as she was leaving home, we have small town versus big city, childhood versus teenagehood.
• 1:01:52
  Speaker A: Yeah, they're older than her.
• 1:01:53
  Speaker B: Yeah, they're older than her. And also, like, the way that Kiki dresses at home and the way that the other little girls are dressed is very more childish. And then we also have old fashioned versus modernity, because that small town that she's in, that she grew up in, presumably is very old fashioned. All these little girls are wearing puffy dresses and pinafores, and then we get to the city, and people are dressed pretty modern.
• 1:02:23
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:02:24
  Speaker B: I really liked the encounter with the geese as she's flying, and then her not heeding their warning about the gust of wind.
• 1:02:32
  Speaker A: Do they warn her?
• 1:02:35
  Speaker B: They're saying it. I guess it's not technically a warning because Gigi, they're all honking, and then Gigi's like. They're saying that a gust of wind.
• 1:02:43
  Speaker A: Is coming, and then we see them immediately all get blown by the wind. So they didn't even heed their warning because they all get, like, knocked out.
• 1:02:50
  Speaker B: Of the window, flip their wings, and they're ready for it. Yeah, they're right. They're riding the gust of wind higher up. That's what birds do.
• 1:02:58
  Speaker A: Sure. That's not what it looked like happened in the movie. To me, it looks like they all got, like, blasted by the wind and started tumbling through the air. And I was like, wait, what? I would have to double check with, because I thought that was weird. I was like. It looked like the wind just, like, knocked those, which makes no sense, but.
• 1:03:13
  Speaker B: No, because we see them, like, right before it happens, we see them all, like, flip their wings.
• 1:03:18
  Speaker A: I swear, they start tumbling like crazy. But maybe I'm wrong.
• 1:03:21
  Speaker B: I think he does.
• 1:03:22
  Speaker A: No, I know she does, but I swear, we see it come down the line of geese, and they're all, like, flopping all over the place. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I just hallucinated that. Cause I thought that I was a little confused about that, because I was like, what? I thought the whole point was that they knew the wind was coming and she didn't. Whatever. But I might be completely wrong.
• 1:03:42
  Speaker B: We mentioned it earlier, but I love that the baker's husband makes her a sign for her, for their window.
• 1:03:49
  Speaker A: Yes, we mentioned that. Yeah, the little. It looks like it's made out of bread.
• 1:03:52
  Speaker B: I also love the little moment the first time she goes to the old lady's house. The little old woman who's, like, a caretaker or whatever is, like, in the hallway pretending to fly on the room.
• 1:04:03
  Speaker A: It's fantastic.
• 1:04:04
  Speaker B: She's like, yeah, it's good, this movie. I kind of mentioned it earlier. It has far more of an actual narrative structure than the book does. It's very episodic. The book is. And up to a certain point, it was pretty faithful. I was reading it, and I was like, this is pretty close to the movie. And then the last 60%, 50% of the book was especially random and kind of, like, silly and nonsense y in the way that the first half was not.
• 1:04:46
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:04:46
  Speaker B: Which I thought was kind of weird.
• 1:04:49
  Speaker A: Felt like it lost its aim a little bit.
• 1:04:53
  Speaker B: Yeah, it felt like it lost its purpose a little. It maybe needed to, like, regroup.
• 1:05:01
  Speaker A: It's meta in that sense.
• 1:05:02
  Speaker B: It is. And there's also a bunch of stuff from that section of the book that gets left out of the movie, and deservedly so. There's this entire story where she goes, she meets this old woman who knits hundreds and hundreds of something that she calls belly bands, bandas, which I presume is just like a band, like a scarf that goes around your stomach. I have no idea what I got out of it. And then she tells Kiki to take this one to her son, who's the captain on a steamboat. And then it turns out that they put it on one of the stacks of the steamboat so that the steamboat feels better and stops making a weird noise. And this works for some reason. There's also a whole New Year's Eve thing where it's New Year's and the clock tower stops working, which is really bad, because the new year's tradition in this town is that the clock only chimes on the new year, and everybody in the whole town runs around the clock tower while it's chiming. But they need a gear, and they don't have a gear. So the mayor tells Kiki to go to a neighboring town and take. And borrow the gear from their clock. And Keke's like, you mean steal it? And he's like, no, we're just borrowing it. Just don't say anything to anybody when you take it. So she, like, flies over there, and then she realizes that they also have the same tradition of running around the clock tower at midnight. So she's like, well, I can't take it. So then she goes back, and she ends up manually pushing the minute hand to get it to midnight.
• 1:07:06
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 1:07:07
  Speaker B: And then I mentioned the train. Yes, there is a train heist in this book, and the story goes that there's going to be a concerte by these traveling musicians, but all of their instruments got left on the train. So Kiki has to fly out and catch up with the train and get on the train and get all of the instruments. And I spent the whole first part of this chapter being like, how in the world is she gonna carry a bunch of bandits, an entire band's worth of instruments, off of a moving train? And it turns out that what she does is tie all of them together on a string and then, like, flies the entire string, and it's, like, making noise as she's bringing it back. It was fun. It was fun. But it was also kind of like, I don't know, the last chunk of this book was so much more silly than the first part of it in a way that felt very odd.
• 1:08:03
  Speaker A: Yeah. Real quick, I looked up what belly bands were. Cause I was the thing. Pregnant people.
• 1:08:09
  Speaker B: Right. I looked it up too, and that was the only result that I got.
• 1:08:13
  Speaker A: To support the stomach of pregnant people.
• 1:08:16
  Speaker B: It does not seem to be how they're being used in the book. It seems more like they're being used for warmth.
• 1:08:21
  Speaker A: Oh, interesting.
• 1:08:22
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:08:22
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 1:08:23
  Speaker B: Because I, too, googled it. I was like, is this a thing? I don't think it is. Not in the way that the book thinks it is, at least.
• 1:08:31
  Speaker A: Well, or it's a cultural thing, or it could be. Yeah, very likely. Interesting. Okay.
• 1:08:37
  Speaker B: My last note here that I just wanted to mention was when Kiki's talking with Ursula about her depression, her stressy depressy, and she says, flying used to be fun until I started doing it for a living. And, boy, did I feel that. Yep, this is the true millennial film.
• 1:09:01
  Speaker A: It really. Really. Yeah. Oof. It really is. All right, let's go ahead and talk about all the things that Katie thought the movie nailed, as I expected, practically.
• 1:09:15
  Speaker B: Perfect in every way. Before Kiki leaves home, she does ask her dad to lift her up like he did when she was little. Her mom does insist that Kiki take her broom and not the one that she made. There's also a scene where they kind of have a little tiff about what color dress Keiki should wear when she leaves. The bells in the trees that chime as Kiki is hitting them as she leaves. Those are from the book. Also. Keke listening to the radio as she flies along. She does settle in a town by the ocean. She was purposefully looking for a town by the ocean, and it does have a clock tower at the center of it. When Kiki arrives in town, the general reaction, I think, is similar, like, people's general reaction to her. They're kind of like, what? Okay, I guess. And then my final kind of sad note here is that I guess the movie actually does nail the lore about cats and witches.
• 1:10:22
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:10:23
  Speaker B: Because the book tells us that as a witch grows up, she doesn't need her cat companion anymore. And they eventually, she loses the ability to understand them and talk to them, and then they eventually part ways and live separately, which made me really sad. And presumably, we don't know for sure that Kiki regained the ability to understand Jiji at the end of the. We don't ever hear him.
• 1:10:54
  Speaker A: We hear him meow.
• 1:10:55
  Speaker B: Yes, we hear him meow.
• 1:10:57
  Speaker A: I have heard that this is one of the changes.
• 1:11:01
  Speaker B: I think it is, because I recall when I was a kid that when he jumps on her shoulders at the end, he says, kiki.
• 1:11:09
  Speaker A: He did.
• 1:11:09
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:11:10
  Speaker A: So that is one of the changes I read. I read about when I was doing prequel research, is in the original. I say the original in the first English, or at least the first Disney english dub of the movie. They had him speak English again at the end that she could understand. And then fans were upset about that because that's not how it plays out in the movie. Because she doesn't understand him anymore, because she has now moved into adulthood, has grown up to the right, which is.
• 1:11:38
  Speaker B: Basically what the lore is in the book.
• 1:11:40
  Speaker A: And so then when they redid it, they had him just meow instead of say her name. So, yes, that is what.
• 1:11:46
  Speaker B: That still makes me sad. I don't like. I don't like that. I understand the metaphor and whatever. I get it. But also, if I could talk to our cats and then one day I couldn't talk to our cats, I would never recover from that devastation.
• 1:12:07
  Speaker A: It's true. It's true. All right, we got a handful of odds and ends before we get to the final verdict. The first shot of this movie, well, it's like the second shot or third, but one of the first shots of this movie is this low angle shot of Kiki laying in a field, like looking up at the sky. And I found it vaguely reminiscent of that shot from Alice in Wonderland that I talked about, which is the only shot that I thought was any good in Alice. That's not fair.
• 1:12:42
  Speaker B: It was the most interesting, the most.
• 1:12:45
  Speaker A: Visually compelling shot in, or, I guess, drawing in animation in Alice in Wonderland. But this one, I thought, was decidedly more beautiful. Just to be fair, it's ten years, twelve years later, or whatever, but it is kind of wild when you compare these movies to some of that Disney stuff. I think these movies are way prettier oh, yeah.
• 1:13:09
  Speaker B: Just the colorway of these movies is so much more delightful. Kind of like saturated pastels.
• 1:13:16
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:13:19
  Speaker B: I also had a thought about the opening shot of this movie. It is beautiful. It struck me this time watching it, that it's also could be a little ominous. Hear me out.
• 1:13:35
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 1:13:37
  Speaker B: It's like this beautiful, idyllic countryside shot cut by a disembodied radio broadcast. It was giving start of a post apocalyptic movie.
• 1:13:51
  Speaker A: I could see.
• 1:13:51
  Speaker B: That's fair. And then that stops immediately once you realize what the radio broadcast is about. But that very first initial where it's just a very quiet. And the wind and the grass waving. And then you hear the radio broadcast. What's happening? Are the zombies coming?
• 1:14:08
  Speaker A: It is the beginning of. Of fallout or something. Yeah, exactly. No, I could see that for sure. You mentioned earlier that she ends up in a train and sleeps on a train briefly in the movie. Yeah, and I had a note about that that was like, is that a thing people would just happily do? I know. Not the sleeping. I know. It's like hitching on trains. There's a whole culture in America of people riding trains, sleeping on train. It's got a name that I'm blanking on now for some reason. Oh, my goodness. I've watched YouTube videos about it. I can't. It's got a name for, like, riding on trains. It's like vagabond, but not that it's.
• 1:14:43
  Speaker B: Like stowing away on trains.
• 1:14:44
  Speaker A: Yeah, but it's got a specific name or something like that that I'm just completely blanking on. But when she sleeps in that train, she crawls into it and it's like a big pile of hay, which was a fine thing to sleep on. But then she takes her dress off and covers herself in it. She tucks in and she's like, this will be nice. And I'm like, the movie treats it as if it's perfectly normal. And I was like, that would be the itchiest thing of nightmare.
• 1:15:12
  Speaker B: It would be horrible.
• 1:15:13
  Speaker A: No, you could never. Like, again, if you want to sleep on it, like, in your clothes, like, it's softer. Like, sure. Like, it would still be itchy, but. But she like, strips down and, like, crawls into it like a sleeping bag. And I'm like, ah, no, I also.
• 1:15:30
  Speaker B: That's when that scene ends. Like, her foot kind of falls through the hay and we see that actually, there's like.
• 1:15:37
  Speaker A: It's like, you know, netting and.
• 1:15:38
  Speaker B: Yeah, there's cows under her that are like, eating the hayden and her foot falls through, and the cows start licking it, and she starts laughing. And I just want to say for the record that if my foot fell through the hay I was sleeping in and then I felt something licking it, I would not be laughing.
• 1:15:55
  Speaker A: No, not funny at all.
• 1:15:59
  Speaker B: I also want to acknowledge that in both the book and the movie, Kiki really just gets stupid lucky when she meets Ahsohno.
• 1:16:07
  Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
• 1:16:07
  Speaker B: Could not have found a more supportive person.
• 1:16:10
  Speaker A: The best possible encounter. Yes, absolutely. One little thing I thought was funny is, like, when she goes on that first delivery, she's delivering that toy to Kat is the kid's name.
• 1:16:21
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:16:22
  Speaker A: As soon as that kid started talking, I was like, I know that voice.
• 1:16:26
  Speaker B: I was like, whose voice is that?
• 1:16:27
  Speaker A: Whose voice is that? And I looked it up, and it's voiced by Pamela Adlin, who's been in lots of stuff and has done lots of voices. But the thing she's probably most known for, she's the voice of Bobby Hill. And it almost sounds exactly like.
• 1:16:39
  Speaker B: Bobby Hill's voice is very similar to little boy voice. Yeah.
• 1:16:43
  Speaker A: And that is what Bobby Hill's voice is. And so it's very close. She's also one of the characters, one of the main characters in recess. If you watch recess.
• 1:16:52
  Speaker B: I did watch a lot of recess.
• 1:16:53
  Speaker A: Spinelli.
• 1:16:55
  Speaker B: Oh, Spinelli, my love.
• 1:16:56
  Speaker A: Yes, she's Spinelli. She's also been in, like, live action tv shows and all kinds of stuff. Very talented actress, but, yeah, she's the voice of Bobby Hill and Kett in this movie.
• 1:17:07
  Speaker B: When Tombow invites Kiki to the party, she's like, I don't know. I have a lot to do. And he goes, he's like, be back by six because that's when I'm picking you up. Get fucked, tombo.
• 1:17:28
  Speaker A: He read a pickup artist's handbook, and they said, look, when they. If they seem hesitant, you just gotta tell them what time you're picking them up.
• 1:17:40
  Speaker B: And then she like, she goes to the old lady's house, and she's, like, hanging around and, like, helping them with stuff around the house. And Gigi's like, we're gonna be late. And she's like, it's fine to that party. Yeah. And I was like, I would rather be having tea with these old ladies than go to a stupid combo party. I would just hang out there all night.
• 1:17:58
  Speaker A: They seem wonderful.
• 1:17:59
  Speaker B: Yeah, they seem great. Seems like way more fun than an aviation party with Tombow.
• 1:18:04
  Speaker A: Yeah, but during that thing, it cracked me up. I was like. Cause the whole thing that's making her late is that when she goes to pick up the pie to take it, and it's like a pot pie. Herring.
• 1:18:16
  Speaker B: It's herring and pumpkin, which sounds awful.
• 1:18:18
  Speaker A: Not sound great.
• 1:18:19
  Speaker B: I mean, it's supposed to sound awful.
• 1:18:21
  Speaker A: Yeah, but it's like a pot pie, but it's not baked. And that's what. So she has to wait for it to bake because the old lady's oven is not working. But Kiki's like, oh, well, you have this old oven here, like, your old wood fired oven, like, her gas oven or whatever isn't working. She's like, you got your old wood fired oven. We could light that up and use that. And they're like, okay. And I'm like, Kiki, I feel like you're missing the very obvious solution here of taking the pie to the bakery that you literally live in and just, like, baking it there for 30.
• 1:18:50
  Speaker B: That has fires going probably 24, 724, seven.
• 1:18:53
  Speaker A: Yeah, basically. And just, like, fly it there. It'd be good to go. And, I mean, unless you're maybe it's, like, way out of the way. I don't know. Like, maybe. Maybe she would have to fly very far to get there and then very fly far to the ice, but whatever. But I was like, that seems like the obvious solution here, but I don't.
• 1:19:09
  Speaker B: Want to sound like a killjoy, but I do want to know what is up with all of the raucous laughter in this, because it feels unwarranted most of the time where a character will just, like, open their mouth and laugh uproariously for several minutes. And I don't know if it's, like, a cultural thing or. But I have questions.
• 1:19:32
  Speaker A: So I believe this is, like, an anime trope. And so I think it is essentially, like, a cultural thing. I say that I haven't watched a lot of anime, but this is a thing I've seen in other anime, and it's a thing I associate with anime specifically because it's a thing people do when they're spoofing or, like, imitating anime. Like, if you see, like, somebody, like, imitating, like, an anime voice or something like that, they will often, like, I am here to defeat you. Ahahahaha. You know what I like? They will do that thing. And I think that's just a thing in anime where. And thus is a cultural thing where just these kind of outbursts of extreme laughter that seem kind of weird.
• 1:20:16
  Speaker B: They seem kind of like they don't fit in this situation.
• 1:20:20
  Speaker A: Cause I noticed that as well. And there's a handful of times throughout the movie where that happens where a character will just be talking normally and then kind of stop and go, ha ha ha. And you're just like, what in the world is happening? And. Yeah, like I said, I think it's like an anime thing.
• 1:20:34
  Speaker B: Okay. I think that makes sense.
• 1:20:35
  Speaker A: People know more about anime and stuff. Or if you know more about, like, if it's, like, specifically just a japanese culture thing. I don't know. Like, is that a thing that only happens in anime or is it a thing that also, like, in japanese culture people do? I don't know that. I have no idea.
• 1:20:51
  Speaker B: Maybe, like, does that happen in, like, live action?
• 1:20:54
  Speaker A: That's what I mean. That I have no idea. I just know it happens in anime a lot. Because, again, it is a thing that when people are spoofing anime, they do all the time. So I assume it's just kind of a thing within the genre. As I thought more about this while editing, I realized that it could also be related to it being dubbed in English because as I think about it, this actually happens in live action movies that are, like, in Japanese or Chinese or whatever originally and then get dubbed in English. Sometimes the laughing will be kind of out of nowhere and sudden in the same way. And it may be related to just being, like, a dubbing thing. I don't know if anybody has any speculation or knows about why that happens. Let us know. Another thing that I wanted to know was, like, a cultural thing or what. But there's when. When. When Kiki gets sick, she's laying in bed. And this is also just an outdated way you would treat this, but she's got a cold or the flu or something like that. Which also, they say she got it from flying around in the rain, which is not how you get. Whatever, but point. It doesn't matter. None of that matters. But while she's recovering from her cold or her flu or whatever, she's laying in bed and she has an ice pack sitting on her head that is tied to a string that is being supported on, like, a stand coming out from behind her bed so that it will hold it on top of her head.
• 1:22:21
  Speaker B: Right.
• 1:22:22
  Speaker A: And I want to know if that's a real thing people did slash do because I've never seen.
• 1:22:28
  Speaker B: I mean, I know the ice pack is right. As far as the, like, string contraption, I think this is the only thing I've ever seen that in.
• 1:22:35
  Speaker A: That's. That's why I was wondering, because I've never seen it in any other media. Like, I've seen the ice pack thing? Sure. But even that, I think, is not unless you have a really high feed you're not supposed to have.
• 1:22:44
  Speaker B: Could be cultural, could just be outdated. Could be both. I don't know.
• 1:22:48
  Speaker A: Could just be a fun thing they made up for the movie. Like a quirky thing. I have no idea. I was just wondering.
• 1:22:53
  Speaker B: Hey, I have an idea. Let's put this on a show.
• 1:22:55
  Speaker A: Exactly. That was why I wanted to ask, because I have no idea if it's whatever. And again, I think it's probably not the Mayo clinic's recommended way to treat the flu or the cold or whatever, but that's irrelevant. I just want to know if that was a thing people did where they would use a string to hold up an ice pack on their head while they laid in bed or something like that. I don't know.
• 1:23:16
  Speaker B: I mean, it's innovative.
• 1:23:18
  Speaker A: It is, for sure.
• 1:23:19
  Speaker B: Your ice pack's not gonna, like, slide down onto your pillow that way. My last note here is about the painting that Ursula does of, like, the girl on the flying horse and the bowl.
• 1:23:32
  Speaker A: It's awesome.
• 1:23:33
  Speaker B: It's awesome. And I would unironically hang a print of it in our home.
• 1:23:37
  Speaker A: No argument for me. It's very cool. I like it a lot.
• 1:23:40
  Speaker B: I'm gonna look for one on the Internet. We can add it to our gallery wall.
• 1:23:43
  Speaker A: There you go. Before we get to the final verdict, we wanted to remind you, you can do us a giant favor by heading over to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, goodreads threads, any of those social media platforms interact with us. We'd love to hear what you have to say about Kiki's delivery service. If you can answer any of the questions that we've asked, or you just want to give your opinions on the film or the book or both, we'd love to hear that. So please do that. You can also help us out by going over to Apple Podcast, Spotify. Wherever you listen to your to this podcast, drop us a five star rating, write us a nice little review that helps get our show out to more people. And if you would really want to be awesome, you can head over to patreon.com thisfilmis lit. Support us there for a few bucks a month, and at the different levels, you get access to different stuff. But starting at the five dollar a month level and up, you get access to bonus content where every month we release one bonus episode talking about whatever we want. This month it'll be out. Probably next week we will be talking about the animated the Hobbit, which we just did finished up our Hobbit series for the summer, but we're going to be talking about the animated Hobbit. And yeah, every month we put out a new one of those. So look out for that. And at the $15 level, if you have a patron request, you can get that in and we will put your movie book to the top of our well, as high on our list as schedule as we can get it. We plan pretty far out in advance, and by we, I mean Katy plans pretty far out in advance.
• 1:25:05
  Speaker B: I appreciate that acknowledgement.
• 1:25:07
  Speaker A: Yeah, I do the editing, you do the scheduling, but yeah, we booked pretty far out. But we will get your patron request in as early as we can. And that's where you do that. Patreon.com this film is lit Katie it's time for the final verdict.
• 1:25:24
  Speaker B: No sentence, fast violation after that's stupid. As is often the case with my birthday episode pics, Kiki's delivery service is a movie that holds a lot of nostalgic value for me as a kid, I loved it as a fun adventure story that featured a witch, one of my most favorite things. As an adult, I feel I can truly appreciate the themes leaving childhood behind for adulthood, feeling drained by the responsibility of said adulthood, and struggling to navigate who you are and where you stand as your life changes around you. I had never read the book before we did this episode. In fact, I didn't even know that the movie was based on a book. The book was cute and I enjoyed some of the lore that Kadono created, but overall it was a little too childish for me to fully enjoy. The episodic structure and general silliness of some of the vignettes were definitely something I would have liked more when I was younger, but as an adult, I just didn't find them super satisfying. I still find the movie satisfying, though. I think that Miyazaki and his team made several good calls in adapting it, namely giving the story a more cohesive narrative structure and choosing a few solid, interrelated themes to focus on. Because of those choices, I think we ended up with a movie that's both entertaining and relatable across a variety of different people, and it's for these reasons primarily. Then I'm going to give this one to the movie.
• 1:26:59
  Speaker A: All right, I'll tack on my note. This is so I watched. Keke's delivery service was the first studio Ghibli film I watched. It was my favorite because I'd only watched one. Then we watched spirited away, Kiki's delivery service was still my favorite. Then we watched Howl's moving castle and Kiki delivery service was still my favorite. And then we've rewatched Kiki's delivery service, and Kiki's delivery service is still my favorite song. We'll have to rewatch some other ones and watch some other new ones. There's other ones that I know I think I would probably like, but this one remains my favorite of the studio Ghibli films that I've seen. So Katie, what's next?
• 1:27:36
  Speaker B: Up next, we're doing more anime, actually. I didn't realize that I had done this when I was planning out the schedule, but we are going to be talking about perfect Blue, a novel. Bye, Yoshikazu Takuchi. Apologies if I butchered that. I did not remember to look up how to pronounce it. And then the 1997 film.
• 1:28:01
  Speaker A: Yeah, I've never heard of this.
• 1:28:02
  Speaker B: I had never heard of it either. This is a patron request I have looked up.
• 1:28:07
  Speaker A: Sorry, I was gonna say I looked up the movie just to see, and it's got great reviews. So it's incredibly critically acclaimed.
• 1:28:13
  Speaker B: From what I've seen, it sounds like I have not started the book yet, but I read a little bit of a synopsis, by which I mean the back cover of the book, and it sounds like it's gonna be a little more adult than Kiki's delivery service.
• 1:28:27
  Speaker A: The movies on, like, when I looked up the movie to see, like, just at all what it was and I didn't look at the plot or anything, but it just like the first sentence on Wikipedia says it's like the genre. It's like a thriller.
• 1:28:39
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:28:39
  Speaker A: Psychological thriller.
• 1:28:40
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:28:41
  Speaker A: So very different than Kiki's delivery service. But yeah, it should be. Should be a lot of fun. So come back in two weeks time, we'll be talking about perfect blue. But in one week's time, we're hearing what you all had to say, discussing your feedback on Kiki's delivery service and previewing perfect blue. So until that time, guys, gals, non binary pals, and everybody else, keep reading.
• 1:29:02
  Speaker B: Books, keep watching movies, and keep being awesome.