Kiki's Delivery Service

Kiki's Delivery Service is showing at Phoenix Picturehouse on Saturday 17 October, as part of the cinema's Kids' Club. It's a morning screening, starting at 11.00am, so it's one of those outings you can get done before lunch and still have the rest of your Saturday ahead of you. The Kids' Club is presented with UNICEF, and they describe it as bringing families together through a love of cinema, which is a nice way of putting it.

If you're not familiar with the venue, Phoenix Picturehouse is one of Oxford's oldest cinemas, and it's got a fair bit of history behind it. It opened on Walton Street back in 1913 as the North Oxford Kinema, became the Scala in 1920, and had sound equipment installed in 1930. Over the decades it grew into one of the most important art-house cinemas in the UK outside London. In 1970 the single auditorium was split into two, Studios One and Two, and after a change of ownership in 1977 it was renamed the Phoenix. In 1989 it became the first of what would grow into the Picturehouse family of cinemas, and a bar added in the 1990s brought it to its current configuration. It's a proper old-school cinema that's seen a lot of changes over the years, and it's still running on Walton Street.

Kiki's Delivery Service is the Studio Ghibli classic about a young witch who moves to a new town and starts a delivery service on her broom, and it's a gentle, warm film that works well for a morning session. Since it's part of the Kids' Club, it's aimed at families, but it's the kind of thing that holds up for adults too. The screening is on Saturday 17 October at 11.00am at Phoenix Picturehouse, so you'll be out and about in the morning rather than settling in for a late one.