Where is Kikis town, Koriko?
Regarding the anime "Kiki’s Delivery Service," Hayao Miyazaki has said that the inspiration behind the fictional town of Koriko is based on the real town of Visby in Gotland, Sweden. The only difference is that the fictional town of Koriko where Kiki lives is a much larger city than Visby.
If you ever travel to Visby, you will see a lot of medieval city walls with the center of the city on a hill. There is also a clocktower in the city center, which has a similar look and feel to Koriko.
There are a lot of other European influences to the buildings and shops within Koriko, which makes the city look more like Stockholm in some ways or even Munich, Germany.
According to Miyazaki, it’s “a mishmash of various locales, like Napoli, Lisbon, Stockholm, Paris, and even San Francisco. Therefore, one side is like the shores of the Mediterranean sea, but another side seems to border on the Baltic sea.” Miyazaki and his main staff visited Visby on the Swedish island of Gotland, and they also visited Stockholm. They shot 80 rolls of film in Stockholm and Visby, gathering location images as inspiration for the scenes in Koriko. For the most part, Koriko is composed of images of Stockholm. A side street in Stockholm’s old city, Gamla Stan, is one model.Sweden was the first foreign country Miyazaki ever visited. It was for the “Pippi Longstockings” project, back in the 1970s. The trip didn’t achieve its purpose (getting permission from the author of “Pippi”), but Visby apparently left a strong impression on him, so he later used its images in “Kiki”.
