Rating: 
Summary: Just enjoy the magic!
Review: After reading all of the critiques of this DVD presentation, I am amazed that I still enjoy watching this film. Instead of thinking too much about the technical aspects of translation, try sitting down with this movie and let its beatiful story roll over you. It will make you wish that you were 13 years old again, when your innocent view of the world was both shaken and renewed by the acts of others. If you are a parent, you must buy this for your jaded, modern children. Mine were entranced, presumably by the idea that Kikki could live on her own whle still maintaining her dignity and sense of responsibility to her new friends.
Rating:
Summary: superb! : )
Review: This is the cutest little story with unbelievable characters, and beauftiful art. I couldn't help but totally love Kiki, and when she was sad, I wanted to cry for her. Gigi, her black cat, is hilarious! Awesome side-kick!
I have just recently been introduced into Myazaki's animation, and I cannot wait to get more!!!! Perhaps the fact that she's a witch and she's so much more gifted and special, but still so very sweet makes her so captivating.
Beautiful story that will find it's way into any child's heart!
Well I'm 22, no child, but I still love it.
Rating:
Summary: So cute
Review: Kiki's Delivery services is so charming and uplifting. The setting is absolutely beautiful and the heronine is plucky and likeable. You will definitely enjoy this treasure.
Rating:
Summary: The Best
Review: The movie "Kiki's Delivery Service" is one of my favorite movies. I was really young when i first saw it but now I'm 13 going on 14 and it's still a great movie to watch if you feel bored or just in the mood. But i think the best time to watch it is when you finish watching one of Miyazaki's other movies. Something like "Spirited Away" that's also a great movie. Kirsten Dunst does a great job as the voice of Kiki. The music is also very well-done! The song "Soaring" can really get stuck in your head and also the ending song "I Wanna Fly"
Rating: 
Summary: Not a good movie
Review: After loving Mononoke and Spirited Away MANY times in the theatre, and loving Castle in the Sky on Dvd; this is probably one of the worst movies that I could imagine someone making of his calibur. What a waste of money. It's nothing like the others, its a Disneylike kid's movie - view and buy it strictly for that.
Rating:
Summary: Glitched "Delivery"
Review: "Kiki's Delivery Service" is an utterly charming, beautifully animated movie, and Hayao Miyazaki is a one-of-a-kind filmmaker everyone should get to know. The Oscar for "Spirited Away" brought long overdue Hollywood notice for a Japanese craftsman whose films outgross Disney in Japan. Unfortunately, the shoddy quality control on this Disney-distributed DVD set makes me worry that the other DVDs may contain similar glitches, thus hampering Miyazaki's exposure in America. Not one but two copies of "Kiki" had the same flaw: the last scene and closing credits did not play. Instead, the film jumped back to the DVD menu. So ... highest marks for "Kiki" and Miyazaki. Back to the drawing board for Disney's DVD effort.
Rating: 
Summary: Recommended for the kiddies
Review: I bought this on the strength of Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke, but the story here is not engaging for an adult, and is obviously pitched for a younger audience. As such, it's fine, there's no violence and the animation is pretty enough to watch along with your kids without being too bored. Beats Barney. For an adult viewer, the Japanese language version is far superior, but that isn't really relevant I suppose, since an adult isn't likely to watch this alone, and the kids will want the English, which is too cutesy by half.
Rating:
Summary: Good movie, so-so DVD
Review: I first saw this movie when it had its belated VHS release in 1998 or '99 and was pleasantly surprised. It wasn't the first Miyazaki film to be released as a dub in the US--"The Castle Of Cagliostro," "Laputa: Castle In The Sky," "My Neighbor Totoro," and "Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind" (which was retitled "Warriors Of The Wind," shorn of a full twenty minutes of footage) all preceded it--but it was one of the few treated with any decency, and more to the point, it had an OK dub. Yes, a few lines were added, just to make sure that we all knew what we were seeing and to make sure hitchhiking wasn't encouraged, and some new music cues were overlaid over parts of the film by its original composer, Joe Hisaishi, because silence is apparently bad, but it's far from the butchering "Nausicaa" got, so let's all try to have a sense of perspective, shall we? It's not worth worrying about, now that the Japanese audio is on this DVD. "Kiki" isn't a great film, the way that Miyazaki's other family films ("Totoro" and "Spirited Away") are, but it's an awful lot of fun. Based on a Japanese children's novel called "Majo no Takkyubin" (usually translated as "Witch's Delivery Service") by Eiko Kadono, it's the story of a fairly clumsy and unskilled young witch, Kiki, whose only real skill is that she can ride a broom (and she isn't very good at that in the beginning, either). She's reached the age where young witches have to travel to another city for one year in order to learn a trade using their skills, and she departs with her cat, Jiji. That's all I am going to tell you; any more would spoil the story. Suffice it to say that this is a gorgeously well-animated film, a nice story, and very entertaining. The subtitles provide a better watching experience than the dub (and, yes, they aren't good at conveying the nuances of the dialogue, but this is something any non-native Japanese will struggle with--I certainly do--and hardly Disney's fault), but the dub is good enough for anyone who isn't a film geek or animation buff. Kirsten Dunst did a good job capturing Kiki's personality, Phil Hartman played a Phil Hartman character and did it entertainingly (although the character he plays can't really be called "Jiji" because of that), and Tress MacNeille gave the best performance as Osono. My complaints here are limited mostly to the DVD itself. Disney may call it "a spectacular 2-disc special edition," but the extras are extremely underwhelming. What do we get? On disc one, we get a bunch of ... trailers (including ones for "Castle In The Sky" and "Spirited Away" which do a terrible job of giving you an idea of what those films are supposed to be about) that do nothing but waste bit space. I assume this is what Disney considers "synergy" these days. Next, there's a boring little Electronic-Press-Kit-type featurette about the voice bubbing, obviously done in '98, since Phil Hartman is alive and well here (sadly, he wouldn't be for long), that runs for all of about five minutes and tells you zero about the film. To round it off, there's a few minutes of trailers for the film itself. Whee. The film itself is presented decently, although there are some serious quality-control issues involved. Push "Play" and you'll get a five-minute introduction from John Lasseter. Once that's done, the movie starts, and we've got some problems. First, the opening and ending credit sequences in the dub version look worse than they did on the videotape. They're so grainy they look like TV commercials that had been stored in someone's sock drawer for thirty years. Second, while the balance of the film is fine (a little soft, some edge enhancement, but better than most anime DVDs), there are a few instances of print damage (including one that wipes out a couple frames near the end of the movie in a haze of blue) and the color balance is off--Kiki looks a little too pale. Actually, she looks like she's dead at times. The credit sequences, at least, look much better in the Japanese version, thanks to the miracle of seamless branching, and have obviously been better taken care of. Finally, some [one] decided that this 100-minute-plus feature needed a grand total of 16 chapter stops, making it near-impossible to find some of my favorite sequences. Thanks, Disney. At least it's in anamorphic widescreen. But wait! There's a whole second disc to consider! And it's a waste of time. Disc two consists entirely of another version of the feature presented entirely through storyboard sketches, with either the Japanese or dub track as accompaniment (but no subtitles for the Japanese version). I like this sort of thing when it shows up as a multi-angle feature during a film, or as a gallery item, but this is just absurd. To make a bad idea even worse, it's divided into the same old 16 chapter stops as the "regular" movie--only this version doesn't get the "luxury" of a scene select menu. So, the only possible value this could have had is completely thrown away. So, with all that, is it worth a watch? You bet. It's fun just to watch the animation, admire the lovely backgrounds, and wish you could live in a city like that. The story isn't bad, either. Now if only someone could clear up all the rights issues with "Nausicaa" and give that a proper home video release on DVD, we'd be all set.
Rating:
Summary: Key to watching a Miyazaki film.
Review: From watching a lot of foreign films, I always find dubs very distracting because they make me think more about what the characters were really saying; I've always been a bit suspicious of dubs because it's of small consequence who actually did the film translation, unlike in books. As a small example, Robert Fagles' translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey shine in comparison to others. I would recommend watching the subtitled version because even if you don't catch the text, there's always the nuances in the tone of voice and the animation itself: Miyazaki's characters have a personality beyond screen presence; their expressions, body language, and unspoken emotions provide plenty of subtle subtext and this is another on the long list of reasons why Miyazaki is one of the best animators in the world. Kiki's story is more than simply about hard work, it's also a story about overcoming doubt within oneself. It's about a thirteen-year-old suddenly realizing that failure is a very real possibility and that the world and some of the people in it may not be as nice as she thought. It's about her taking that self-doubt and knowledge of the possibility of failure and rising to the occasion in spite of it all. Thinking in the context of the film and the character, who wouldn't be shaken if at the the age of thirteen, they suddenly met with doubt about who they were and what they were doing in a large, strange town with what they thought were very modest resources (even if one of those resources is witch magic)? In the end, no amount of magic can compare with what's in the heart, with carrying on in the shadow of doubt. Yes, it takes some thinking to read subtitles and catch all the subtlety in the animation, but I think it's worth the effort.
Rating:
Summary: Quite the charming tale!
Review: Ever since I first saw this film in 1998 I've fallen in love with it! I didn't really think that a story about a girl's experiences as a delivery girl wouldn't be that exciting, but after I found out that this was directed by Hayao Miyazaki and produced at Studio Ghibli, I thought 'What the heck; it must be good'. And indeed it was. The beautiful and cute 13-year old girl, Kiki, runs a delivery service by using her magical power to fly after she leaves her home to train for a year with her cat, Gigi. The setup is similiar to the novel of the same name(which is now available in america), but the events that occur are quite different. For instance, Kiki never loses her power in the novel, nor does the blimp scenario ever happen in the novel either. But that doesn't keep this movie from being a good film. Hayao Miyazaki usually takes different stories and molds them into a different sort, sometimes making them better. This is one of those cases, in my opinion. As for the DVD, it includes the japanese version(finally!), which has its' differences from the english one. Namely, the music. There are long moments of silence, which work really well in some parts. Though Disney went and added some new musical pieces and piano solos. They even REPLACED some of the old music too! The only thing they added that I liked was the music that was put in when Kiki goes into a forest in search of the cat toy. It made the atmosphere more mysterious. I enjoyed listening to Disney's newly added songs to the opening and ending credits, though I love the japanese ones better. As for the voice acting, I thought all of the English voices were good. Though I'm a bit mixed on the new direction gave to Gigi's character. I'm fond of the sarcastic, witty Gigi that Phil Hartmen portrays, but then again I also like the japanese 'feminine' sounding voice too. 'Tis a tradition in most animes to give the sidekick animal character that sortof voice (ala Sailor Moon, Cardcaptor Sakura, etc.). I loved Kirsten Dunst as Kiki's voice; she managed to sound just about as cute and bubbly as the original. Ursula sounded OK, but it would've been nice if Disney gave her a lighter, sweeter sounding voice like in the japanese version. Either way, I suggest you get this DVD if you love anime, or a good story. Adults CAN enjoy this as well as kids, if they have an open mind about it. Heck, the superb animation is enough of a reason to see this. That, and Kiki herself. ;)
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