The Witch is Back: Why Kiki’s Delivery Service Returning to IMAX Feels Like Coming Home
3 min read
There’s a particular kind of magic that happens when you’re thirteen years old, curled up on a couch, and a young witch flies across a moonlit sky for the very first time. For many of us who grew up with Studio Ghibli, Kiki’s Delivery Service wasn’t just a movie; it was a feeling. A warm, breezy, slightly melancholy feeling that we’ve been chasing ever since.
This March, Kiki returns to IMAX. And I’ve been thinking about why that matters more than it probably should.
We’ve Seen This Film a Hundred Times (and That’s the Point)
Let’s be real, nobody in the Ghibli faithful needs to see Kiki’s Delivery Service again. We’ve watched it on worn VHS tapes, on scratched DVDs, on late-night streaming sessions when we couldn’t sleep. We can quote Osono. We know exactly when the music swells as Kiki soars over Koriko’s harbor for the first time. We’ve already cried at the part where she loses her magic and doesn’t know why.
And yet.
There’s something about seeing it in IMAX on a screen that fills your entire field of vision that promises something different. Not a new film, but a bigger one. A chance to see those hand-painted backgrounds, the ones that look like someone bottled the Mediterranean summer and poured it onto celluloid, at a scale Miyazaki may never have imagined when he made the film in 1989.
What Kiki’s Delivery Service Is Actually About
If you’ve only ever watched it as a child, you probably remember it as a sweet story about a little witch who delivers packages on a broomstick. Which is true. But revisit it as an adult, and something different emerges.
Kiki is a film about creative burnout before we had a word for it. One day, Kiki can fly, and then slowly, painfully, she can’t. There’s no villain responsible. No curse to break. She just… loses it. The spark goes quiet.
Miyazaki has said in interviews that he was thinking about professional artists and animators when he wrote that arc people who pour everything into their craft until there’s nothing left, who wake up one morning and find the thing they love has become something they can barely touch. For those of us who work in creative fields, or who’ve ever gone through a period of profound exhaustion, that hits differently at 32 than it did at 9.
The resolution isn’t triumphant in the conventional sense either. Kiki doesn’t rediscover her magic through some grand emotional epiphany. She just… tries again. Desperately, imperfectly. And somehow that’s enough.
The Visuals Deserve This Moment
Here’s the honest argument for spending the money on an IMAX ticket: Kiki’s Delivery Service is one of the most visually generous films ever made.
The city of Koriko, with its cobblestone streets and seaside clock towers, was designed to evoke a composite of European cities, Stockholm, Lisbon, and Paris, filtered through the eyes of someone who loved them all. Every frame is dense with detail. Laundry hanging between buildings. The particular way light falls on water in the early morning. The texture of bread, which in this film becomes almost sacred.
On a laptop screen, some of that detail collapses. On an IMAX screen, it breathes.
Joe Hisaishi’s score, one of his most underrated in the Ghibli catalogue, will also have room to actually exist in a proper theater. The opening theme alone deserves to be heard loudly.
A Note to Longtime Fans
If you’re reading this, you probably don’t need convincing. You’ve already looked up the showtimes. You’re already planning to go alone, or with someone who Gets It, or with a child you want to introduce to the thing that shaped you.
But I’ll say this anyway: there’s something quietly moving about the fact that we keep coming back. Kiki’s Delivery Service turns 35 this year. It was made by hand, frame by frame, by artists who believed that a small story about a girl finding her footing in the world was worth that kind of effort.
Going to see it in IMAX in March is a vote. A small, personal, slightly extravagant vote that says: yes, this still matters. This kind of care and craft still deserves a big screen, a dark room, and your full, undivided attention.
Kiki flew a long way to get here. The least we can do is show up.
Kiki’s Delivery Service returns to IMAX theaters in March. Check your local listings for showtimes.
