Kiki and Jiji already have a Ghibli film that’s undisputed, a 2014 Japanese live-action, and even a West End musical. Now there’s more: BBC Studios Kids & Family, the British producer Wheel in Motion, and Kadokawa announced a partnership to develop a live-action series based on Eiko Kadono’s novels. The project will adapt the first volume of the six-book series into ten half-hour episodes.

The writer chosen for the script is Irena Brignull, known for her work on films like The Boxtrolls and The Little Prince. Kadokawa’s involvement connects the project directly to the original Japanese source material, while BBC Studios and Wheel in Motion bring international production experience for the global TV market.

Focusing the first ten episodes solely on the first book is significant: it means the production will have space to deeply explore Kiki’s early days in the coastal city, the start of her delivery service, and her initial struggles and lessons in independence, without the compression of a cinematic format. It’s essentially the same material as Miyazaki’s film, but with more time to breathe.

Kiki’s Delivery Service (Majo no Takkyubin) is a series of novels by Eiko Kadono that began publication in 1985 and concluded in 2009 with six main volumes, plus a side story about Osono published in 2014. Kadono received the Hans Christian Andersen Award for Writing in children’s literature in 2019, one of the world’s most prestigious awards for children’s literature. The story follows Kiki, a young witch who must leave home on the night of the full moon to begin her independence training, accompanied only by her black cat Jiji. She settles in a coastal town and opens a delivery service using her broomstick, learning lessons about self-confidence, friendship, and growing up. The most famous adaptation is the Hayao Miyazaki Studio Ghibli film of 1989, considered one of the studio’s most beloved works.

Do you think a ten-episode live-action series can capture what makes Kiki’s story special, or is the Ghibli cinematic format too hard to match?