We've decided we're going to watch a Studio Ghibli movie a day since they're all on Netflix! Some of them we've seen before, some we haven't, some only one of us has seen, but it doesn't matter because you can't really go wrong with Studio Ghibli films!
Today we watched Kiki's Delivery Service. We'd both seen this before, but the first time I watched it, I didn't really care for it. It seemed simple, had very little plot, and didn't seem to say anything profound like Studio Ghibli had accustomed me to in the movies I'd previously watched. But as an adult (and with the help of Patrick H. Willems' excellent video essay), I realized Kiki's Delivery Service did have a profound statement to make, and that statement was about burnout and depression. About how doing the thing you loved could become difficult, even impossible. No matter how good you are at it, no matter how much you love doing it, the things you love can burn you out.
Kiki loves flying. It's the one witchy thing she's shown doing (besides talking to her cat). She can't always do it super well, but she doesn't let that stop her. She loves flying so much, she makes it a key component of her new business when she sets off on her own. But pretty soon, that city living wears her down, and she stops being able to fly. She's angry at her friends, at the people who have helped her out, and it isn't until she takes a sabbatical out in the country with Ursula, a painter she befriended earlier (and a well-timed emergency involving one of her friends) that she learns to fly again.
Ursula talks about her painting, and how she's always wanted to do it, but sometimes, she just can't, and she needs to take a break before she can do it again.
I think we all have that one thing (or maybe many things) in our lives that we love to do, that we can't imagine not doing for the rest of our lives, that we nevertheless have to occasionally take breaks from because it's just getting to be too much, or too hard, or not fun anymore. And we take our breaks, sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for a few months, sometimes for a few years, and then we remember how great it felt to do it before, and we start doing it again and we can't understand why we stopped doing it in the first place. Sometimes that feeling just magically comes back, sometimes it takes a lot of work, and sometimes, you fear it may never come back at all, no matter how hard you try. Yeah, that happens too. Fortunately, it didn't happen to Kiki, and it hasn't happened to me either.
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