![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Kiki's Delivery Service
21/11/11 14:15I just finished reading the first of the Kiki's Delivery Service novels! It was HIGHLY ADORABLE, though much more episodic than the movie; while the movie follows the first chapters of the book pretty closely, it then ratchets up the emotional stakes and puts a climax in, while the book keeps on adding little adventures until the year is up and it's time for Kiki to go back home.
I also liked the way that the movie had some little unexplained call-backs to the book. In the movie, when you see Kiki fly off on her broom for the first time, she brushes past the trees as she goes by, and bells ring out. In the book, it explains that she was very distractable when she was first learning how to fly, and while she was flying she would get distracted by something or another and she would stop paying attention to flying and crash. So the bells are to remind her that she's flying and better pay attention!
But the thing that I thought was really interesting, from a storytelling perspective, is the very beginning. The first we see of Kiki in the book, her mother is bothering her to pick a date to leave, and she's all "MOM STOP BUGGING ME." And then she decides she's going to leave in five days after all, on the next full moon.
In the movie, the first we see of Kiki is that she's lying on the grassy slope, listening to her radio, hearing it say that there's going to be good weather that night -- and just then, she decides she's going to leave that very night.
Usually, the writing advice books say that you have to have some external event that puts pressure on the main character to change their life. Gandalf shows up with the Ring; the heroine discovers that her boyfriend is cheating on her; the heroine's little sister gets picked for the Hunger Games. At one level that makes sense. It makes it hard (or impossible) to go back from that point, and it seems that there should be some reason why the protagonist chooses that day to act rather than last year or last Thursday. But -- I'm just so terribly fond of Kiki lying in the grass and deciding, it's tonight. It makes me believe in her, more than in the book, as someone who is thirteen years old, but is also mature and ready to spend a year on her own in a strange city. We don't so often see that nervous, determined excitement in English YA novels (for example), where the major change that starts the book is so often something the parent or the school or the oppressive government is foisting on the characters.
I also liked the way that the movie had some little unexplained call-backs to the book. In the movie, when you see Kiki fly off on her broom for the first time, she brushes past the trees as she goes by, and bells ring out. In the book, it explains that she was very distractable when she was first learning how to fly, and while she was flying she would get distracted by something or another and she would stop paying attention to flying and crash. So the bells are to remind her that she's flying and better pay attention!
But the thing that I thought was really interesting, from a storytelling perspective, is the very beginning. The first we see of Kiki in the book, her mother is bothering her to pick a date to leave, and she's all "MOM STOP BUGGING ME." And then she decides she's going to leave in five days after all, on the next full moon.
In the movie, the first we see of Kiki is that she's lying on the grassy slope, listening to her radio, hearing it say that there's going to be good weather that night -- and just then, she decides she's going to leave that very night.
Usually, the writing advice books say that you have to have some external event that puts pressure on the main character to change their life. Gandalf shows up with the Ring; the heroine discovers that her boyfriend is cheating on her; the heroine's little sister gets picked for the Hunger Games. At one level that makes sense. It makes it hard (or impossible) to go back from that point, and it seems that there should be some reason why the protagonist chooses that day to act rather than last year or last Thursday. But -- I'm just so terribly fond of Kiki lying in the grass and deciding, it's tonight. It makes me believe in her, more than in the book, as someone who is thirteen years old, but is also mature and ready to spend a year on her own in a strange city. We don't so often see that nervous, determined excitement in English YA novels (for example), where the major change that starts the book is so often something the parent or the school or the oppressive government is foisting on the characters.