Kiki’s Creativity and Consumerism

Kiki’s Delivery Service is a coming of age tale. It’s a story about a young witch, Kiki, who leaves home to spend time away, honing her craft as a witch. She’s supposed to increase her specialisation, find her role and place. During her time away from home, Kiki grows up. She learns about how to live on her own, how to balance her work, how to deal with different personality types and dynamics, all while finding herself as both a witch and an adult.

Today, we’re going to delve into Kiki’s world. Kiki finds herself in a new and quite loud and busy town, one which is full of many personalities and relationships she struggles to find her place in. Kiki’s social insecurities create a drive in her to make money, urging her to find her place through purchases and money. The intense drive she suddenly has for work and money drains her creativity, which is directly tied to her witch powers. Part of Kiki’s coming of age is finding her balance, and learning how to allow her creativity to thrive.

When I mentioned Kiki’s social insecurities, this may come as a surprise. Often in movies and television shows, characters with social insecurities are often depicted as being either introverted or having an awkwardness in their social flows.

Kiki has neither of these. Kiki is extroverted, and seems freely able to hold a conversation with those around her, even those incredibly different from her. She seems to enjoy chatting to others, and seems to find pleasure in getting to know about them. She doesn’t hesitate to ask questions. She seems quite comfortable once she’s in the conversational flow, and as soon as someone responds positively, she’s happy to continue to engage.

Not only does she feel it comfortable to speak to others, she also properly engages with them. She’s constantly happy to help out. Her immediate response when she first meets Ossono, who is trying to catch the attention of a mother who left her child’s binky, Kiki doesn’t think twice about offering to help. This continues through her other engagements. She chooses to help out Madame, the older lady who is wanting to have her deliver a pie. Kiki helps to make the pie and clear out an oven for it to cook. While the pie is cooking, she volunteers to help in other areas of the house.

So it’s not other people, per se, that Kiki struggles with, but rather a kind of person, a kind of interaction. When Kiki first leaves home, she comes across another young witch, who seems incredibly impersonal and stand-offish. At first, Kiki doesn’t seem to react in any negative way about it. But when she arrives in the city, Kiki finds herself surrounded by people unwilling to talk and unwilling to engage with her. She sees people being ungrateful, disconnected, and impersonal, which causes her to question her own position. The biggest view of this she gets is with Madame, who she helps to bake a pie for her granddaughter’s birthday. When Kiki delivers the pie, the girl is ungrateful, breaking Kiki’s heart.

Kiki doesn’t feel as an introvert would when faced with social interaction, but rather how an extrovert who loves people feels when faced with people turning their back on her. She struggles when people seem to be unkind and uncaring, or - maybe even worse for her - indifferent. While she isn’t shy, she is working through a form of social anxiety.

Leading up to the climax of the movie, where she loses her powers, she continues to struggle to form close personal friends. And the most frustrating thing for her is: she doesn’t know why.

One of the reasons why is that, despite her active engagement with others, she does have a lot of deep rooted personal insecurities. We see these immediately in the film, before she even leaves home. Kiki is supposed to leave home when she is 13. Her family is planning on her leaving a week later than she decides to, but she feels an intense need to leave early because of it being a clear sky and a full moon - the “perfect” night. She’s obsessed with the idealised view of her life and her possibilities, which means that when things don’t go perfect, she begins to struggle.

Kiki also has a lot of uncomfortable views of herself and aspects of her witch tradition. It’s tradition to wear the black dress of a witch - her mother informs her of this when she complains about how ugly the dress is. She has made her own broom, so gets upset when her mother insists Kiki take hers instead. Kiki sees that broom as too big, not just right, a less than ideal alternative.

Kiki’s obsession with feeling ugly and out of place continues. When Tombo first sees her, he spots her immediately as a witch. While this may in part be due to her flying on a broom, he specifically mentions her black dress. This makes Kiki upset, and she refuses to speak to him. Why? Because it’s a reminder of the part of her she thinks as ugly.

Very early, we see Kiki’s obsession with trying to change her appearance. She stares in the window of a store, looking at a pair of red shoes, commenting on how beautiful they are. But she also sees their price, and laments on how expensive they are. It seems these become her financial goals, and she begins to work hard to change these aspects of herself.

Kiki throws herself into her work, and seems more interested in doing what she can to either fit in or make money than in finding some aspect of her work that’s personal to her. When she sets up her delivery service at the beginning, she says it’s “the only thing she can do”, not that its her favourite or her goal. She also gets quite a bit of a first payment, and so sees the potential of the work.

When she’s invited to a party by Tombo, she comments that she doesn’t really have anything to wear, but is assured that her black dress is fine. After finally agreeing to go to a party with Tombo, it rains on her way home. She decides to let Tombo go on his own, and shouts that she has nothing to wear as she stomps up the stairs.

Kiki has a habit of self-rejection in this way. Her insecurity about her dress makes her remove herself from situations, though she may not be super clear as to why. After her self-rejection from the party, she is pushed to hang out with Tombo. She is having a good time with him, finally establishing a friendship between them. As they lounge in a park, a car full of Tombo’s friends pull up, and he rushes to chat with them. He then says he wants Kiki to meet his friends. Instead, Kiki makes excuses and runs away from the situation.

When she is back home, talking to Gigi, she says “You should have seen how Tombo’s friends looked at me”. Despite her bemoaning this, there’s no evidence in the scene they were questioning or looking at her in any particular way. Later, she tells Gigi:

“Gigi, I think something’s wrong with me. I meet a lot of people, and at first, everything seems to be going ok. But then I start feeling like such an outsider.”

She seems at least somewhat aware, then, of the way the reality of the situation was different than her own perception. In fact, Tombo’s friends seemed impressed she had a job at her age, rather than resentful or critical of her. She didn’t run away from Tombo’s friends because they were overtly rude to her, but because she was scared they would be. She’s so scared for the possible othering that she others herself to make sure it doesn’t happen.

She isolates herself because of this, and pushers herself more and more toward her job to try and make up the difference with the money she could make. She sees the money has the way out of this isolation. If she had a prettier dress, then maybe she wouldn’t react this way. She literally makes herself sick through the effort, both physically and spiritually.

Kiki wakes up one more unable to access her witch’s powers. She has isolated herself so much that she no longer even understands Gigi, and she’s unable to fly - her own access for her job.

Despite her concern that she has forever lost her witch’s powers, the adults around her seem less upset. Ossono tells her to rest, and it’ll come back. Urusla, an artist in the woods Kiki met during one of her deliveries, offers to have Kiki stay with her to recover. Kiki takes her up on it.

Ursula and Kiki both discover that Ursula’s artistry and Kiki’s witchery are inherently related. Ursula says “painting and magical powers seem to be very similar”. During this conversation, Urusula is actually sketching Kiki. She had been inspired by Kiki’s previous visit, but felt something was wrong. Kiki seems suprised she would be even interested in her. The act of this intimate artistic moment between them is one step to healing Kiki’s insecurities. She begins to see herself as worthy and beautiful as she sees literally beautiful art being made of and about her.

At night, the conversation about these connections between art and magic continues. Kiki notes how surprising the similarities are, and listens intensely as Ursula recounts her own time that she suffered from an artistic burnout. Ursula shows Kiki how making her art her job causes more chances for the art to escape and be lost in the rushing of the everyday push.

Ursula encourages Kiki to “go for walks”, to enjoy life, to slow down, to stop thinking too much about it.

Creativity, and how we study or analyse creativity, has, historically for academics, been focused on the product of the thing. Like Kiki, scholars of creativity were focused on the outcome and the result, what we can get out of it, rather than on the process. A lot of this is because it’s a bit complicated to study creativity without looking back in hindsight. We see something made, and then go “oh, how’d that happen. Let’s look at it” - which means that we are somewhat focused on the outcome.

Despite this, creativity is a process. And one that is social and cultural in its basis. We often speak about creativity as if its an individual thing - a person is creative. But rather, creativity is communal. It is helped and encouraged by being around people. We learn from others, we grow from others. Our creativity is spurned on through the discussions and interactions we hold with the other people around us. Creativity isn’t individual, but communal. It’s social.

And so when Kiki isolates herself, she is breaking herself apart from her own creative spirit, furthering her ostricisation and her creative burnout. And its when she reconnects with the social around her that things change. Her relationships with Ossono, Ursula, and - ultimately - Tombo, help to heal her burn out and creative slump, and its through an attempt to save and reconnect with them that she heals her creativity and has her powers come back.

Kiki’s difficulty was in understanding the relationship her creativity held in connection to the strange other worlds of the new social space she finds herself in, as well as the previous social worlds of her tradition. Her push against her black dress is a demonstration of her push against her tradition. She feels othered by being a witch, but also feels a close affinity with being a witch. She finds her tradition complicated, and she struggles to find her own place within it.

Her isolation and difficulty with her own worlds is a combination of all these factors: her isolation, her obsession with monetising, and her need to fit in with these new social worlds. Its a dangerous combination for maintaining her creativity without burnout.

Creativity is often thought of as complete innovation, but there is a lot of creativity in alterations on the established. In a book on creativity and improvisation, Tim Ingold and Elizabeth Hallam compared this to building a house. When a house is built, we praise the architect’s creativity, but the actual builders are not given the same consideration. But there is creativity in the active alterations that are necessary when something is being brought to life. Not everything goes according to plan, and sometimes builders are the ones who have to make these decisions. And this is a form of creativity - an alteration on tradition, a choice to change the structures.

Therefore, when Kiki tries to establish her own form of witchness based on her tradition, this is, too, a form of creativity that is tied to her witch powers. We see an element of this when she grabs the nearest broom to try and save Tombo. She finds herself and her place within her tradition, but also in her new social world. What began as simply a way to make money simply through her witch powers became a connecting thread between her and new friends - her ability to fly. Tombo is obsessed with aviation and flying, and so is in awe of her abilities.

Her relationship with Tombo, therefore, shows how she begins to find herself in her new life - the way her tradition meets her new situation, and gives birth to her own unique form of creativity.

I love Kiki. It addresses how sometimes our life is not as ideal as we would prefer, and sometimes we have to deal with that. She learns how to harness her creativity, but also to give space for her creativity to breathe and renew, and not be so bogged down in her need to buy things to fit in. She sees her social worlds slowly forming in new ways, having learned tough lessons that even adults still need to learn, and re-learn, on a regular basis.