Kiki's Delivery Service/Production

Development of Kiki’s Delivery Service began in the spring of 1987, when Group Fudosha asked the publishers of Eiko Kadono’s book if they could adapt it into a featured film directed by Hayao Miyazaki or Isao Takahata of Studio Ghibli. Due to the approval of Miyazaki’s film My Neighbor Totoro and Takahata’s film Grave of the Fireflies for production, neither Miyazaki nor Takahata was available to take up the direction of the project at the moment.

Osono and Kiki serving customers at Gütiokipänja Bakery. The name of the bakery was a joke by Eiko Kadono, making reference to Guchokipa, an alternate name for jankenpon, or Rock, Paper, Scissors. In the English dub, the bakery is referred to as Good Cooking Pan Bakery.

Miyazaki took up the role as producer of the film while the position of director was still unfilled. During the start of the film's production and the nearing of Totoro's completion, members of Studio Ghibli were being recruited for senior staff for Kiki’s Delivery Service. The character design position was given to Katsuya Kondo, who was working with Miyazaki on Totoro. Hiroshi Ohno, who would later work on projects such as Jin-Roh, was hired as art director, partly because he was requested by Kazuo Oga, who was part of Miyazaki's Totoro team as well.

Although many positions had been filled, the project still lacked a director. Miyazaki, busy with Totoro, looked at many directors himself, but found none he thought fit to articulate the project. Finally they found a director, Sunao Katabuchi (which was to be his directorial debut) who had previously worked with Miyazaki on Sherlock Hound. Ghibli hired Nobuyuki Isshiki to write the script but Miyazaki was dissatisfied by the first draft, finding it dry and too divergent from his own vision of the film. Studio Ghibli rejected this draft of the screenplay as a result.

Eventually, when Totoro was finished and released, Miyazaki began to look more closely at Kiki’s Delivery Service. He started by writing a screenplay himself, and since the novel was based in a fictional country in northern Europe, he and the senior staff went to research landscapes and other elements of the setting. Their main stops were Stockholm and the Swedish island of Gotland. Eventually Miyazaki took over as director when Katabuchi got intimidated.

The original Japanese opening theme is "Rouge no Dengon" (ルージュの伝言, Rūju no Dengon^?, "Message of Rouge"), and the ending theme is "Yasashisa ni Tsutsumareta nara" (やさしさに包まれたなら, "Yasashisa ni Tsutsumareta nara"^? "Wrapped in Kindness"), both performed by Yumi Matsutoya (credited as Yumi Arai).

Inspiration for Koriko

Miyazaki has noted that the real town of Visby in Gotland, Sweden is the main visual inspiration for the city. Fictional Koriko is much larger than Visby. Generally the buildings and shops of Koriko have the look of Stockholm, or the old town of a Central European city such as Munich.

The film is set in an idealised trouble-free northern Europe . The name of the city is not actually used in the movie (except in writing on the side of a briefly visible bus) and it is often spelled "Coriko" in publications from Ghibli.

Kiki and Jiji illustrated by Akiko Hayashi from Majo no Takkyūbin. For the film, Kiki's hair was cut short to make the workload easier for the animators.

Upon their return to Japan, Miyazaki and the creative team worked on conceptual art and character designs. Miyazaki began significantly modifying the story, creating new ideas and changing existing ones. Majo no Takkyūbin, the original children's book by Eiko Kadono that the movie was based on, is very different from Miyazaki's finished film. Kadono's novel is more episodic, consisting of small stories about various people and incidents Kiki encounters while making deliveries. Many of the more dramatic elements, such as Kiki losing her powers or the airship incident at the film's climax, were not present in the original story. Miyazaki made these changes to give the film more of a story, and make the film about the hardships that Kiki faces while growing up; he remarked, "As movies always create a more realistic feeling, Kiki will suffer stronger setbacks and loneliness than in the original".

As a result, Kadono was unhappy with the changes that were made between the book and film, to the point that the project was in danger of being shelved at the screenplay stage. Miyazaki and Toshio Suzuki, the producer of Ghibli, went to the author's home and invited her to the film's studio. After her visit to the studio, Kadono decided to let the project continue. Miyazaki finished the rough draft of the screenplay in June 1988, and then presented it in July 1988. It was at this time that Miyazaki revealed that he had decided to direct the film, because he had influenced the project so much.

The word Template:Nihongo3 in the Japanese title is a trademark of Yamato Transport, though it is used today as a synonym for Template:Nihongo3. The company not only approved the use of its trademark, though its permission was not required under Japanese trademark laws,but also enthusiastically sponsored the film, as the company uses a stylized depiction of a black mother cat carrying her kitten as its corporate logo.

Kiki's Delivery Service was originally intended to be a 60-minute special, but expanded into a feature film running 102 minutes after Miyazaki completed storyboarding and scripting it.