MovieChat Forums > Majo no takkyûbin (1990) Discussion > Was the ending changed?

Was the ending changed?

posted 11 years ago by FOXracingfan
2 replies | jump to latest

I watched this movie when I was really little, and I found it fairly cheap at a used video store and decided to buy it so I could watch it again.

I started the movie and realized right away some of the lines seemed different than I remembered (Such as Jiji never saying "Don't panic!" or something along the lines as Kiki flew through a storm) but then the blimp scene was very different. In the version I watched the boy was handing from a rope and the blimp hit a clock tower, Kiki flew over and saved the boy.

My memory of the movie is that the blimp was burning. I even asked my mom what she thought happened (because I use to watch this movie on repeat as a child) and she said "Doesn't the blimp burn?" Maybe we both are just remembering wrong. But I was curious if the ending was changed?

Thank you!

[–] wastedyuthe 11 years ago

I don't ever remember it burning. And fyi it's not a blimp. The Goof's say this "The Disney dub refers several times to the airship as a "dirigible", which is correct, but also as a "blimp", which it isn't; it is a zeppelin, a rigid airship with an internal skeleton that holds it in shape, not a blimp, which is basically a big helium-inflated balloon held in shape by the helium"

The one thing they did change was removing the cat's line at the end when he asks Kiki if she can hear him again. He just meow's again, as he does in the Japanese original. This is much better, as his voice was only there as Kiki used the cat as an imaginary friend giving him an actual imaginary voice. But as she started making friends and finding her place in the city, she didn't need his imaginary voice anymore. Hence him still meowing at the end and her smiling- she understood at this point why.

[–] susan111_az 11 years ago

That's an interesting phenomenon, where two separate memories can be conflated. Did you see or read The Princess Bride? In the book, the famous fight at the top of the Cliffs of Insanity takes place at night, in an open space between the forest and the cliffs, under bright moonlight; in the movie, it's set in the roofless ruins of a castle, in daylight. I'd read the book more than once before I saw the movie; for months after seeing it, before the first video release, I clearly remembered the film as showing the Duel Scene in the roofless ruins of an abandoned castle, at night under bright moonlight.