Kiki's Delivery Service

"Kiki's Delivery Service", Hayao Miyazaki's follow-up to his canonical masterpiece "My Neighbor Totoro," is often slighted as a minor entry in his filmography. What nonsense. This gentle parable - about a kind teenaged witch who has to leave home in order to establish independence, yet finds that being entirely independent of help from other people, no matter where you are, is literally an impossibility - remains among the most socially complex works Miyazaki has ever created. It's also among his most beautiful.

The extra features included on Disney's latest Blu-ray release of the film befit such a pedigree. We get a laudatory introduction from director John Lasseter (the "Toy Story" series), a number of short featurettes (about the score, Kiki's cat Jiji, the physics of broom-flight depicted in the film, the voice actors, and other stray elements), and a half-hour documentary on the locations used as inspiration for the film. (That's not to say that the film is set anywhere specific: Miyazaki has audaciously noted that "Kiki," set in a European beachside, takes place in an alternate universe where World War II never happened.)

But the best extra here, as is usual on discs from Studio Ghibli, is the storyboard presentation of the film. This allows you, essentially, to see the film in sketch: An animated film prior to its animation. Watching "Kiki" in this form, the rhythm of the picture is as apparent as the lush animation is in the completed version. The way Miyazaki constructs this film - out of interludes, like Kiki's attempts to complete her deliveries, more than out of traditional plot - allows it a moment-to-moment lyricism that his more narrative-focused pictures, like "Mononoke" and "Nausicaa," can't possibly provide.

"Kiki's Delivery Service"
Blu-ray/DVD Combo Pack
Disney.com
$36.99