Jiji

Hayao Miyazaki adapted Eiko Kadono's 1985 children's novel Majo no Takkyubin into a 102-minute feature released by Toei in July 1989, with Studio Ghibli producing on a budget of roughly 800 million yen. Jiji, the witch-trainee's black housecat, occupies a strange position in the source material: in Kadono's six-book series he remains a talking cat throughout, a fact the author objected to seeing changed in the film. Miyazaki's decision to silence the cat at the climax was deliberately tied to Kiki's developmental arc, and Kadono initially refused to authorise the adaptation before being persuaded by producer Toshio Suzuki at a face-to-face meeting in Yokohama. Rei Sakuma's Japanese-language performance gave Jiji a slightly nasal, dry-witted register that fit the cat's function as Kiki's sole confidant during her isolation in the seaside town of Koriko. The 1998 Disney English dub, supervised by Pixar producer John Lasseter as part of the Tokuma Shoten distribution deal, replaced Sakuma with Phil Hartman, who recorded his lines weeks before his death on 28 May 1998. The Disney version added several Hartman ad-libs and, controversially, restored a final spoken line for Jiji after Kiki regains her broom-flying confidence, an alteration Miyazaki publicly criticised when the dub was rereleased in 2010 under a revised script that removed the added lines. The film was the highest-grossing Japanese release of 1989 at approximately 2.17 billion yen, and remains one of Studio Ghibli's most-screened titles in Japanese school curricula. Jiji's visual design, a small short-haired solid-black silhouette with large amber eyes, was reused as a Ghibli merchandising mainstay decades after the film's initial run. Production drawings show Miyazaki personally storyboarding the bakery loft scenes where Kiki and Jiji share their first nights in Koriko, with margin notes specifying that the cat should appear physically uncomfortable in unfamiliar interior spaces.