BBC Studios Kids & Family, U.K. production company Wheel in Motion, and Japan’s Kadokawa Corporation are developing a live-action television series based on Kiki’s Delivery Service — the beloved children’s novel by Eiko Kadono that Hayao Miyazaki turned into one of Studio Ghibli’s most enduring films in 1989.
The 10-episode, half-hour series marks the first time the property has been adapted for live-action television anywhere in the world. Irena Brignull, whose screen credits include the Oscar-nominated The Boxtrolls and Netflix’s The Little Prince, is attached to write the series, which will draw primarily from the first of Kadono’s six books. The project is currently in development, with no broadcaster or streaming platform attached and no production or release timeline announced.
The series will follow Kiki, a 13-year-old witch who leaves the shelter of her home to spend a year alone in the coastal city of Koriko, where she starts a broomstick delivery business and gradually builds a life through kindness and perseverance — a coming-of-age story whose appeal has proven remarkably durable across four decades and multiple formats.
Kadokawa is a natural rights-holder to bring to the table: the Japanese publisher and media conglomerate has held a long relationship with the source material, having produced a live-action feature film adaptation in 2014 directed by Takashi Shimizu. That film, starring Fuka Koshiba, received a limited international release and modest critical reception — overshadowed, as most Kiki adaptations inevitably are, by Miyazaki’s 1989 version, which became a commercial lifeline for Studio Ghibli after the back-to-back disappointments of My Neighbor Totoro and Grave of the Fireflies at the Japanese box office.
Kadokawa’s director of international co-productions, Takeo Kodera, framed the project as a tribute to the 40th anniversary of the book series, noting that the U.K. creative team had worked closely with Kadono herself. The 87-year-old author, a Hans Christian Andersen Award winner, gave the project her blessing: “Kiki is about to set off on another adventure into a new world. I’m confident this will be a great show.”
Brignull called Kiki “one of fiction’s great girl characters,” describing the series as an exploration of “the magic that exists in re-invention and human connection.”
