Majo no takkyȗbin (Kiki's Delivery Service)

Sometimes you get lucky.

I didn't find what I was looking for earlier this Summer when I went out to see Die kleine hexe (The Little Witch), but decided to see Majo no takkyȗbin (Kiki's Delivery Service) last week on a whim, and I'd be lying if I didn't say it was exactly what I'd been searching for, apart from the fact that it was released in 1989, and therefore lacking in contemporary applicability.

If it was indeed contemporary, it would have ideally and bewilderingly fit.

Not that I'm complaining.

Finding something in the present that produces an affect you cherished long ago reliably revels in enigmatic ecstasy, but finding something from the past that commensurately impresses, shouldn't be dismissed for ye olde bygone praise.

I'm reminded of people dismissing classic films because they aren't contemporary, the assumption being that the current moment must be the most advanced, because the arts evolve in an unerring progression.

I've tried to explain that the arts are more like a mutation, and that seminal works emerge at different intervals regardless of what mesmerized the past, or will dazzle the future, by citing several well known examples (Citizen Kane, Dr. Zhivago, Casablanca, Dr. Strangelove), and arguing passionately to the viable contrary.

I've never gotten very far, but it's true if you can wrap your head around it, although it was much easier to access classic films in my youth (many are available on Itunes) at what were called "video stores", where you went to rent movies, some of them having better collections than others, many of them wiped out as Blockbuster rose.

It's even hard to come by a film from back in the day that disseminates age old wonder, for I'm sure you've watched some of the beloved films of your youth in recent years, and found them lacking in tantalizing appeal.

Or you've streamed films you missed way back to reimmerse yourself within an old school aesthetic, and found some of the exemplars lacking in eccentric magnetism, or at least not as spellbinding as you had hoped they would be.

Majo no takkyȗbin (Kiki's Delivery Service) resonates with that innocent yet risk-fuelled ageless atemporal fluidity you find in Dickens and Proust however, as the little witch Kiki (Minami Takayama) heads out on her own, to build a life abounding in unchecked novelty.

With her wise contradictory cat Jiji (Rei Sakuma), who supplies grumpy yet pertinent commentary.

It's like otherworldly cool and alternative pluck were joyously yet controversially distilled to craft a regenerative narrative elixir, as intergenerational as it is unique, as wondrous as it is compelling.

I'll have to see every film crafted by Ghibli Studios I'm afraid, and share observations from time to time.

I could have just as easily seen something else that night.

Good fortune when that kind of thing happens.