The one movie that left Hayao Miyazaki with “a personal sense of regret”
No one goes through life without regret, and when you’re an artist, you’re always going to repent certain creative decisions.
We’re our own worst critics, and the smallest arwy detail of a painting or a photo we’ve created will surely play on our minds while going unnoticed by everyone else, which is your wont in the way of making art.
When you’re an artist in the spotlight, however, these regrets can feel more pertinent, especially when you’re a filmmaker, and Hayao Miyazaki can attest to this, who has felt a “personal sense of regret” towards one of his movies, despite the fact that many people consider it one of his best.
Making a movie is a deeply personal experience, as films are one of the most easily scrutinised forms of art out there, measured in star ratings and torn apart by critics (nowadays even more so with the rise in armchair critics taking to Letterboxd), which means presenting a film to the world is tough, so it’s no surprise if a filmmaker walks away from a project wishing they’d done things differently.
For Miyazaki, it was Kiki’s Delivery Service that left him feeling a little unfulfilled, even if the 1989 animated film was met with acclaim both commercially and critically, which is often the way it goes for filmmakers, who somehow tend to regret some of their most popular works while holding closest the ones that fared less successfully.
Miyazaki made Kiki’s Delivery Service just a year after the release of his iconic fantasy film My Neighbour Totoro, proving the Japanese director’s domination over the animated genre during the late 1980s. The Studio Ghibli film follows a 13-year-old witch named Kiki as she leaves home with her cat, Jiji, ready to take on the world without the help of her parents, and soon settles in a new town, where she starts up her own courier service, encountering many of the trials and tribulations of coming of age in the meantime.
It’s a great film that even spawned a musical adaptation, but interestingly, Miyazaki never intended to direct it, having signed on as a producer, but during his process of finding a director, he contributed so much to the pre-production, including writing the screenplay and working on conceptual art, that he eventually decided that it would only be right to take on the role himself.
The film might have been a success, but when the man looks back on it, he can’t help but be critical of it, explaining in a 1997 interview with Animerica Anime & Manga Monthly, “Kiki’s Delivery Service shows another side of the ’80s, that of Japanese economic prosperity. Even back then, I realised that just like the ’80s, Kiki was sincere but somewhat lacking energy. For various reasons, it was a movie I had to make. Commercially, it was a success, but it left me with a personal sense of regret.”
Perhaps the lack of time between projects, which saw Miyazaki dive straight into Kiki’s Delivery Service immediately after My Neighbour Totoro, affected his approach to the film, but it seems like he was being unnecessarily harsh on himself. There is still plenty of energy to be found in the portrayal of the young witch, who faces her fair share of struggles yet never surrenders to pessimism, which is maybe an attitude the filmmaker could himself adopt towards this beautiful piece of work, even though he clearly wishes he’d done slightly differently.
