#Concept art for Kiki's Delivery Service

[illustrations-fantasies]

Studio Ghibli

Concept art for Kiki's Delivery Service

1989

[balu8]

Kiki's Delivery Service 

directed by Hayao Miyazaki

Concept art

Studio Ghibli 1989

[nickpeppermint]

Many people noticed that Giulia has similar clothes to Tombo from Kiki's Delivery Service

But Luca and Alberto also have outfits, strikingly similar to those of Conan from old Ghibli cartoon Future Boy Conan!

In most concept art, Luca is wearing white shirt, more closely resembling the one that Conan wore for some time

But in the movie, it has blue stripes, more similar to the one that on Fio

It was confirmed that towns name Portorosso - is a reference to Porco Rosso (It was also a second name of Luca in early concepts)

Could Luca's shirt be another Porco Rosso reference?

In my opinion, Future Boy Conan must've had a huge inspiration on Alberto character, not only his design, but also behavior, lifestyle and houses very similar!

I highly recommend this classic anime!

[nnaalluuaarxv]

source

Concept art for Kiki's Delivery Service (1989)

Studio Ghibli

[mbscribbles]

Did this super cute Ghibli commission 💜

[kl0i3]

Cozy + Warm Ghibli watercolor art I made!! (commission)

[heliphantie]

“I have a pretty good intuition, so I've got reputation of being an excellent fortune-teller.” (Eiko Kadono, "Witch's Delivery Service")

(Fanart from December 2022.)

The “sister witch” from concept sketches to “Kiki’s Delivery Service”, published in artbook. Character designer: Katsuya Kondo, June 2 turned 60 years. Apparently, she was supposed to fill a role of older friend/mentor to Kiki, eventually that role has gone to Ursula the painter.

[hillbilly---man]

You're not allowed to take photos inside but we went to the Ghibli Museum today and I'm 1) glad we got the tickets, and 2) in need of a huge 3d zoetrope like the Totoro one they have there

Here are a few pictures we were allowed to take

[deadly-danaid]

Some Kiki inspired art

[krzaczekuwu]

I am working on a full set of tarot cards for my sister so here are some concepts

[patricia-taxxon]

In art, positive feelings are dumb and negative feelings are smart. This is an association I've noticed in especially online discussions of media, it is an error that has gone uncorrected for entirely too long.

This association is bolstered whenever someone says that you shouldn't criticize the mario movie too harshly because it's "fun" and light frivolous things are self justifying. This association is bolstered whenever people continuously categorize media that makes you feel bad as a strictly adult afair, that anything sad or disquieting or revolting is somehow trying to outsmart you and you're actually very cool & hip for rejecting it in favor of dumb pleasures.

This association leaves two categories of art completely outside of discussion and dying for air. Firstly, art that is joyous and life affirming in a mature and reflective way. It'd seem almost sacrilegious to describe Kiki's Delivery Service as "Wholesome," even though it is such prime comfort cinema there's just so much more to it than that. It's a tangibly adult perspective on the themes it presents. But the "happy=dumb" association is set so deep that nearly all critical discussion about miyazaki's movies is about how pretty and sweet they are. They exist in this category of being overexposed yet somehow still unappreciated.

But then there's the inverse, art that makes you feel like shit in a simple and single minded way. Irreversible is the worst time you can have with a movie, probably, and it (affectionately) has nothing going on under the hood. It's a pain box. This category of art tends to confound folks far more than the previous, it elicits a "what's the point??" usually, or if any concession is made towards allowing uncomfortable art to exist it's with the caveat that it has to "justify" it's discomfort. Simple displeasures don't have the same assumed good faith as simple pleasures. The surface level ways in which a film like Irreversible makes you feel like you've been beat up after it's finished? Not worth mentioning.

There's graver consequences to these two boulder-sized blindspots in artistic conception. Like, because negative emotions are smart, people think that making entertainment out of real life tragedies can be de-facto respectful so long as they make the emotions in their entertainment negative enough. It doesn't matter that Netflix's Dahmer plays defense for the killer and uses the image of black people as a boringly virtuous collection of punching bags to milk tragedy from, if it just makes you feel bad enough, gives the surface level impression of graveness, then it's fine that you're making entertainment out of real life people's personal real life tragedy that still exists in recent memory for many people.

I want to elevate joy, bring it into critical attention, stop taking it for granted. I also want to de-elevate misery, take it off it's false pedestal, let us realize that it's all art. FEELINGS are self justifying, not just good ones.

[gloomy-prince]

To celebrate RAINBOW!'s release today, I'm going to go over all the daydream references that have been made so far, since it's fun for me to sneak them in 💖 there's a lot of them though, so it's gonna be under the cut!

Episode 1-- Kiki's Delivery Service and E.T.! People focus on the Kiki reference so much that the other seemed to be missed.

Episode 2-- Princess Serenity and Prince Endymion, Sailor Moon. Another one obvious enough to be called out in some comments. It was referenced again in episode 54, where this panel was taken from.

Episode 5-- Marceline, Adventure time. One of the few reference that isn't an outfit specifically, but a character.

Episode 11-- Revolutionary Girl Utena. Not necessarily supposed to be the characters themselves, just the outfits.

Episode 11-- Minako Aino, Sailor Moon. In hindsight, I don't remember why I chose this specific dress to reference and not the maid outfits from Sailor Stars or the fruits maid outfits from the manga... especially since I think the fruits maid outfits are adorable.

Episode 11-- Catra, She-Ra reboot. I kind of regretted this one immediately just because like 80% of the comments on the episode were "CATRA SUIT!!!" as a result...

Episode 18-- Sailor Moon manga. I was always intrigued by the way characters would be dressed in dreamlike/ethereal sequences in the manga, so this reference was a must for me. I went with the version that is a full dress with straps rather than the dresses from other moments in the manga that have no discernible top half.

Episode 30 and 31-- Not a reference to any specific film or character, but just film noir in general. I do remember referencing a female character specifically for this but sadly I couldn't find it again.

Episode 40-- Pomeranian scene, IT Chapter Two. Surely you saw this coming (or maybe not?) I don't think I got the camera angle good enough to really sell this reference, but I couldn't resist it anyways.

Episode 43-- Adult Losers, IT Chapter Two. The only reference besides Marceline that references the characters themselves, since I normally use our other characters for background character purposes. Also one of the only references that isn't a daydream.

Episode 54-- Disney's Snow White and Cinderella. I couldn't decide which to reference, so I ended up leaning mostly into Cinderella, but referenced the Evil Queen's crown as well. Boo's dress is also somewhat referenced from the the live action Cinderella dress instead of the animated version, just because I liked it.

Episode 54-- Treasure Planet and Treasure Planet 2 concept art. Treasure planet is one of my favorite movies, so there was no way I was missing out on referencing it. A few people brought up some wlw pirate webcomic(s?) in the comments of this episode, but the actual reference seemed to be mostly missed. The sash around Boo's waist is also meant to be fabric from her princess dress in the previous panels.

Episode 54-- Revolutionary Girl Utena. Another one I was kind of surprised wasn't called out just because of how iconic the whole clothed shadow/silhouette thing is.

Episode 55-- Saint Tail. I couldn't reference this one as closely as I would have liked since it probably wouldn't have been very readable as a magician's costume to someone who didn't know it, so it mostly references the brooch from the anime and her hat.

Episode 61-- Jane Fonda in Spirits of the Dead. A super random and out there reference, especially to end on, but I liked the outfit so much that I couldn't help it. Maybe Boo used to fall asleep to old movie channels, lol.

That's it, at least for now! We'll have to see what shows up in future episodes~

[balu8]

Kiki's Delivery Service

Concept art by Yoshifumi Kondo

(The Art of Kiki's Delivery Sevice)

Viz

[icarus-suraki]

1, 7, and 9 for the movie ask!

It occurs to me that I could just answer Goncharov (1972) for all of these…

Movie Questions Ask Bait!

->what is your favorite film of all time? Very possibly Mad Max: Fury Road. That movie rewired my brain. That movie scraped the rust off my soul. That movie sneaked up behind me and stole my spine. And it was great.

I literally went to see it in the theater seven (7) times. Seven. If you dig back in my blog here to June 2015, you'll see that this place was full of Fury Road. Stills, gifs, music, meta, fic, shitposts, all of it. All of it.

Sidebar: I think my absolute love of Fury Road is what's keeping me from wanting to see the new Furiosa prequel: Fury Road didn't explain everything to death so we, the fandom, had a great time imagining explanations or making things up. We dissected that movie and we also left it alone. I don't want to know too much. I like that world being left a partial mystery. We, like Max, get thrown into it and we're both figuring out how it works as the story progresses. I love that.

I can't exactly explain why I love it so much. The colors, the action, the fight scenes, the music (holy shit the music), the characters, the weirdness, the story itself, the callbacks and parallels, the newness and the oldness of it (it really is a train robbery movie at its core), the sense (ultimately) of hope, the presences of women (old women even!) in action roles… Something about it, maybe everything about it, were just perfect for me at that time and in that place.

Yeah. Favorite movie ever.

->name a movie you’re emotionally attached to? There's so many ways I could take this. Positive attachment? Negative attachment? Very Strange Time in My Life attachment?

Like, I know I can never watch L'Illusionniste, Les Triplettes de Belleville, or Grave of the Fireflies again because I cried just too fucking hard at each of them, which I think is an emotional attachment.

Or I could say the Lord of the Rings movies (all of them). They came out when I was in college and a handful of us were counting down the days to the premiere, watching this miniscule clip of video taken by a fan from a train that showed a glimpse of the Minas Tirith set endlessly, gobbling up any news or leak or rumor about production on Livejournal, engaging in the fandom of that era (which was a whole thing in and of itself), even going to midnight local premiers. So while I'm not a huge fan of the movies, they certainly were a constant presence in my undergrad days.

Or it could be the other movies that rewired my brain: Mad Max: Fury Road (see above), Princess Mononoke (baby's first Studio Ghibli film in 1999 at the local art house theater), Star Wars (only episodes 4, 5, and 6 though; I kind of deny that any others exist), Kiki's Delivery Service (which I had on VHS in college and would watch when I was stressed and depressed because I love the city), Voices of a Distant Star (the concept really got me)…

Or it could be the kids' movies from my own childhood, you know? Robin Hood (1973) is very near and dear to my heart. And Panda and the Magic Serpent is what started me down the weaboo road way back when I was 6 years old.

There's so many possible answers here. But that's a few movies I have emotional attachments to. How's that?

->guilty pleasure movie? Do I have to? Okay, okay, okay: I like a good cheesy, gory giallo movie, red tempra paint blood and all. Spaghetti westerns are amazing with their half-understandings or misunderstandings of USAmerican history to the point that it becomes something different, something bigger and more epic (I love The Good, The Bad and the Ugly so much). Martial arts movies full of dramatic scenes and wire-fu are so much fun (and I get to practice my Mandarin or my Japanese). Gothic drama, especially from the 1990s, is great like the original IwtV, Crimson Peak, The Crow…

But I paid actual, real, hard-earned money for a (digital) copy of Bloodsport and it's so bad. It's so bad! But I love it--maybe as much for meta reasons as anything.

Like, the whole thing is based on this Canadian-American guy Frank Dux's memoirs about being trained in ninjutsu by a mysterious Senzo "Tiger" Tanaka (who probably didn't exist at all and has the same name as a character in You Only Live Twice) and then going on to compete in this international full-contact underground martial arts competition in Hong King (the "Kumite"). Oh and he was also in the military at the time, doing covert missions, so he had to go AWOL to fight in this competition of course. Which he does without being caught. And he keeps outsmarting the CID officers (one of whom is played by a young Forest Whitaker) when they chase him to Hong Kong, meanwhile picking up an April O'Neill-style beautiful American journalist ("reporter" because it's the 1980s).

The whole thing is so clearly ridiculous bullshit but it's marketed as being based on a true story because Frank Dux insisted his bullshit was true. And it was produced by Cannon Films, which is another can of worms entirely (I highly recommend the documentary Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films for more backstory on the company; it is bonkers). And did I mention that Frank Dux is played by Jean-Claude van Damme? And yes he does do the most epic of splits.

And the whole thing is simultaneously so deep in meta layers (self-proclaimed martial arts masters, which ties into Count Dante and the dojo wars, Frank Dux's amazing bullshit and stolen valor, Cannon Films) and yet so incredibly shallow at the same time.

There's minimal plot, zero depth to the characters, massively long flashback sequences, even longer training montages, a totally ridiculous amalgamation of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean cultures into just "Asian Culture," the dubbing in some scenes is practically criminal, there's minimal exploration of the location (Hong fucking Kong!!!) outside of a chase and a throwaway scene about bad restaurant food, and even the fight scenes during the tournament aren't really all that great.

But the Kowloon Walled City gets some screentime (except that it's just a set sometimes). And there are tons of locally-hired extras and bit players, along with a slew of international actors and/or actual martial artists, even if a lot of them have been cast as nationalities other than their own???--like Bernard Mariano, who is Filipino by descent but was born in Hong Kong, had no martial arts experience but got scouted while he was working out, was cast as a "Middle Eastern" fighter named Hossein, but used his pay from the movie for university classes to go on to be an English teacher in Hong Kong. Meanwhile, Jean-Claude van Damme is busy taking his shirt off and wearing super tight spandex underwear (he snaps them in one scene; you're welcome). Leah Ayres is a "reporter," which is really "journalist" and one of the few adventurous jobs acceptable for women in 1980s movies to have, who maybe lives in Hong Kong or maybe doesn't but she's super cute and deserves better than she got in the script; she's The Girl (Leah Ayres is now into pseudoscience). And Donald Gibb is playing this American bar brawler who somehow got invited to this elite fighting tournament and he looks like Kurt Russell in The Thing if he were still infected by the Thing and living out on the ice alone.

Like, I could just keep going. I love this shit. There is so little that's "good" in terms of filmmaking, scriptwriting, cinematography, anything in this movie and yet it entertains the fuck out of me.

Hence: guilty pleasure film.

[nnaalluuaarxv]

source

Concept art for Kiki's Delivery Service (1989)

Studio Ghibli

[688199]

marinette is FAR from being a “normal girl, with a normal life” (general criticism, and analysis of the location concept art)

pardon any mistakes, this is a rant post lmaoo

first and foremost, she is the daughter of paris’s most popular bakery. everyone knows it. and it's not loved the same way a long time neighbourhood bakery is loved. sleek high class interior design, like i bet a simple croissant costs 4 euros or smth.

now how about the earlier bakery design?

cluttered, lots of bread stacked everywhere, but it coneys well their love for baking. wonder why those "run down eating places" are always the one that have the greatest tasting food? it's because their heart is in cooking the meal. tbh, reminds me of the bakery in kikis delivery service actually. and why does these two bakeries feel so much nicer despite being so simple looking? because you can feel the hardwork (oh and the brown is a true vibe). full offence but the neatness of the current bakery feels like its a corporate business.

two, while she goes to a public school, it’s like the kids of all the most rich and famous citizens of paris are gathered there. adrien, model and son of renowned fashion designer. chloe, daughter of the mayor. juleka, daughter of famous rock star, alix, daughter of historian at louvre. mylene, daughter of a leading mine performer that had his posters plastered everywhere. that’s like just some of i remember. definitely not normal. unfortunately no concept art of the school. but knowing that the PV did reference marinette's bedroom, im going to assume the school design existed as a brief sketch.

this seems like a classy, rich college, same like the current one. but the design is better, imo, looks more school-ish. and third, it’s so clear that marinette is super rich. like man what the hell that room is thrice the size of mine. yet it lacks so much personality. what does this tell us about her? she likes pink. i seriously cannot find anything here that stands out to me.

this is why i much prefer the concept art locations. at least they look sort of middle class. it also gives marinette a “cozy” vibe, and someone who makes the best out of a given situation.

marinette is given the attic room. lots of beams, not very well furnished. yet she takes advantage of a seemingly bad room by using the beams to place boxes and toys. she also uses cloth to decorate the place, showing her appreciation of cloth design. it’s small, but has character, compared to marinette’s pink spacious room that’s a mess to look at.

furthermore the rooftop clearly isn’t meant to be used like that. but she adds little features to it, such as a simplistic bird house, wood planks to allow an even surface to place stuff/ sit, and a tent tied down by random pink strings and ribbons. it shows how she’s adaptable, creative and caring (bird house). plus it alludes to a sense of defiance and her “wanting to take a break”.

on the other hand, the current (it’s not even called a rooftop it’s called a balcony) is in big open space, smack right in front of the eifel tower, nicely floored with a proper fence and proper table for teapot. nothing here is "make shift" like the previous design. even if marinette did spend time making this place nice, how can we tell? there's nothing that hints to us that she worked on it. it doesn’t convey anything about marinette to us anymore, other than: “oh holy shit she's pretty rich”.

even this even earlier design is simple, but still says more about marinette than the current balcony. she carried her teapot all the way up there even though it's insanely difficult to. this tells us she's willing to put extra effort into things.

you could say im looking too deep into things. but i really am not. people fail to understand that even art, animation and film, every little detail, no matter how small, is important and should tell us the personality of the character.

with all the choices made in the series, how could you convince anyone that marinette is supposed to be normal? the whole concept of marinette and ladybug is that she looks average on the surface, but is capable of being a superhero due to all these favourable character traits of hers that tend to be overlooked. marinette dupain cheng? writers can't even make her look average for gods sake. from her appearance (stereotypically good-looking instead of charmingly cute, there's a difference), and her life in general (blessed with all the chances in the world that basically spoon feeds her her dream).

its exactly like those famous hollywood stars saying how much they suffered before they could succeed. except they were rich from the start with famous parents.