.:My 2 Yen:.
TUESDAY, APRIL 21, 2004
Mmmmm… Kiki…
As a co-production with the French screening of Kiki's Delivery Service, French dessert chain “Paul” is making Kiki themed cakes. The chain is a huge with more than 240 cafés in France and 30 more worldwide. Kiki La Petite Sorcière was screened to a wide audience in France on March 31st. The film is in more than 60 cinemas in Paris. Seems we got ripped off when it comes to our "wide" screening of Spirited Away, which screened in less than 800 cinemas in all of North America, which has five times the number of otaku as France. It might be that the French make Ghibli films a real cinematic achievement? Non-minors in France, by and large, are more open-minded to animation in the movies than they are in America. 800 screens are 50 to 100 times what almost all average parental restricted TV toy line-tied in anime film gets in American cinemas. And Spirited Away made a humble $1.5, 000,000 the first Saturday screened restricted-wide even with the Oscar hype still fresh in my mind, so a bigger screening was not guaranteed. By the way, is anyone else a tiny bit disgusted by seeing the words "eat" and "Kiki" in the same paragraph? Oi Elly, get your mind out of the gutter. Who is issuing it in France? Disney? The French have little to do with Disney. Sadly, I think Kiki's Delivery Service would have flopped had it been a cinematic "wide release" in North America, since it's not the sort of cartoon that would do well with the populace of North America to make back the tens of 1,000,000s they'd spend on advertising and replicating the prints for a wide screening here. The Ghibli films sell well on DVD, where the press's much less involved, but Spirited Away, based on all the information I could find, sold around a humble 500,000 – 600,000 DVDs, a small percentage of what the two Best Animated Feature participants, “Shrek” and “Finding Nemo” sold, and I think it's more due to it having been merchandise that attracts to the norm tastes than it is lack of advertising. I would have liked to see Kiki as a theatrical release.