Kiki's Delivery Service

In a small town between a forest and gentle hills, silver bells hang from tall trees. When they ring without a storm, townspeople know a girl named Kiki has been flying too low on her broom. Kiki is the nearly 13-year-old daughter of Kokiri, a witch from a long line of witches, and Okino, a human folklorist. Witch tradition requires daughters who choose the witch's path to leave home on a full-moon night of their 13th year and settle independently in a town that has no witch. At age 10, Kiki chose to become a witch. She excels at flying but lacks the patience for Kokiri's other skill, growing herbs to make sneeze medicine. Her closest companion is Jiji, a black cat raised alongside her since birth who can speak with her, as is witch custom.

Kiki announces she will leave on the next full moon, only five days away. Kokiri insists Kiki use Kokiri's own reliable broom rather than the untried one Kiki crafted, since flying is Kiki's only magical ability. She also requires Kiki to wear a traditional black dress. Kiki reluctantly agrees but secures a red radio from Okino. On the full-moon night, she says goodbye to her parents and flies into the sky with Jiji.

Heading south toward the sea, Kiki meets a slightly older witch who works as a fortune-teller and advises that the trick to the profession is to take every job. Despite Jiji's urging to settle sooner, Kiki presses on until she spots a large city where the river meets the sea, with tall buildings, a big bridge, and a prominent clock tower. She declares the city of Koriko her new home, but when she lands and introduces herself, the shoppers react with fear and indifference. In her hometown, witches were sustained through mutual generosity. Here, no one offers help.

That evening, Kiki overhears a heavily pregnant baker named Osono arguing about delivering a customer's forgotten baby pacifier across the river. Kiki volunteers to fly it over and succeeds. Osono invites Kiki to sleep in the bakery's flour storehouse. For three days, Kiki hides indoors, intimidated by the city. She eventually resolves to start a delivery business, reasoning that her flying ability can serve people who lack time for errands. Osono supports the idea, offers the storefront space, and suggests the name "Kiki's Delivery Service." A full week passes without a customer, as some townspeople fear Kiki will put spells on their packages.

Kiki's first customer is a seamstress who hires her to deliver a birdcage containing a stuffed black cat toy for a child's birthday. During the flight, Jiji grows jealous of the toy, pries open the cage door, and the stuffed cat tumbles into a forest below. With the deadline looming, Kiki places Jiji inside the cage as a substitute and delivers him to the boy. Searching the forest, she finds a cottage where an artist is using the toy as a model, seeking the perfect "witch's black." Kiki retrieves the toy and promises to bring Jiji back to pose for a portrait. That night, she swaps the real toy back into the boy's room, retrieves Jiji, and sits for the painting. Thrilled to find someone who appreciates her, she writes her first letter home.

When summer arrives, Kiki visits the beach despite a radio warning about sudden gusts called "Mischievous Marine Winds." A woman asks Jiji to play with her son on an inflatable raft, and the predicted winds sweep the boy and Jiji out to sea. Rushing to rescue them, Kiki discovers her broom has been swapped for a cheap imitation by a boy she noticed earlier carrying a broom. The unfamiliar broom bucks and dips, but she grabs the boy and Jiji just before a wave swallows the raft and returns them safely to shore.

Kiki flies inland and tracks down the thief, a boy her age named Tombo who belongs to a local Aviation Club researching witches' brooms. He apologizes, but Kokiri's broom lies on the ground, snapped in two. Heartbroken, Kiki resolves to build a replacement, attaching a fresh ash wood handle to the brush from the broken broom. When the artist asks Kiki to deliver the finished painting to a museum, Tombo devises a helium balloon system that lets the painting float behind Kiki as she flies. As Kiki crosses Koriko with the portrait trailing, townspeople see the real Kiki and Jiji alongside their painted likenesses. The painting, titled The Most Beautiful Black in the World, draws crowds, and the artist paints Kiki and Jiji on the shop sign. Business increases steadily.

As fall arrives, Kiki feels irritable, partly because she keeps replaying a comment Tombo made, that he has never met a girl in town quite like her, and cannot stop analyzing what he meant. A girl her age visits the shop and asks Kiki to anonymously deliver a silver fountain pen and a poem to a boy named Ai for his birthday. Kiki cannot resist reading the poem, but a gust of wind snatches the letter into the river. She and Jiji reconstruct the poem from memory on a ginkgo leaf and deliver it. Three days later, the girl returns, overjoyed that Ai found her through a matching pen she carried. She introduces herself as Mimi, and the two become friends.

As winter sets in, an elderly woman named Violet hires Kiki for deliveries. The most notable is a belly band, a knitted garment worn around the midsection for warmth, to Violet's son, who captains a boat named Tete. The captain is transporting delicate wine bottles, and Kiki finds the sailors wearing layers of belly bands their mother knitted, barely able to move, while the bottles rattle dangerously. She devises a solution: The sailors remove the belly bands and wrap them around the bottles to cushion them. Inspired, Kiki learns to knit and makes belly bands for her parents.

On New Year's Eve, the clock tower, which rings only once a year to start Koriko's traditional midnight race, stops due to a broken gear. The mayor sends Kiki to retrieve a replacement from a distant town, but she refuses to take it after learning those townspeople need their clock for their own midnight tradition. Instead, she flies at tremendous speed toward the clock face and physically pushes the minute hand to 12. The bell rings, the race begins, and word of her deed elevates the town's esteem for her. Near winter's end, she chases a train to retrieve musicians' forgotten instruments and flies back with them strung on her broom, the wind playing the brass. The audience is captivated by the airborne performance, and Kiki notes she has been in Koriko for a full year.

As spring returns, Kiki prepares to visit her parents, as tradition allows after one year, though she feels anxious about whether she has truly come of age. Osono tells her the townspeople miss seeing her fly. At home, Kokiri examines Kiki's knitted gifts and a seashell Jiji has been saving since summer, and tells them they have "come so far" and are "all grown up," quietly filling Kiki with the confirmation she had sought. Kiki shares what she has learned: that walking among people helps them see witches as ordinary. After only five days, she misses Koriko and especially Tombo waving from the bridge. Kokiri encourages Kiki to return. Before leaving, Kiki takes a silver bell from the treetops as a gift for Tombo. As she flies back toward the sea with Jiji, the clock tower comes into view, and she shouts, "Look, it's our town!"