Kiki’s Delivery Service is one of those movies that I feel any aspiring artist should see. The struggle of Kiki in this movie is one that ANYONE who wants to further themselves goes through, that transition from taking what you love to do to something that you make a living off of.
As artists we have all been in the place where Kiki is. That place where we can’t draw anything right, can’t paint anything right, can’t sculpt anything right, that place where everything comes out wrong over and over and we begin to question if we’re actually good enough for the talents and skills that used to come to us like second nature when we were just using them for fun. That place where we want to give up because we suddenly can’t ‘fly’ like we want to, because everything seems too difficult to do that.
But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there, just because it isn’t working right then and there when you want it to be. If you can always fly, then it wouldn’t make those times when you did as special. It isn’t necessarily easy to grow up, nor is it necessarily easy to live with the artistic struggle of losing inspiration. But you can’t just throw up your hands and say ‘No, I can’t do it anymore’ because you’ll NEVER fly if you do that.
You gotta wobble before you stand.
“You gotta wobble before you stand.” Can we just talk about the singer of the original American release songs??? Her name is Sydney Forest. You can find her on Bandcamp, I searched for years to find decent versions of her songs “Soaring” and “I’m Gonna Fly” before finding out who she was. To me the movie just isn’t the same without those songs and the current DVD releases for English markets simply feature the songs from the original Japanese release.
