This Week in Anime

Which Anime Witch Is This?

Chris and Steve put on their pointy hats and hop on their brooms to magic up some witchy anime.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.

Crunchyroll streams Witch Watch, Maebashi Witches, Once Upon a Witch's Death, Madoka, Witch Craft Works, Flying Witch, Maria the Virgin Witch, Witchy Precure, Red Ranger, and Wandering Witch.
Netflix streams Little Witch Academia.
Max streams Kiki's Delivery Service.
Disney+ streams Snow White.
Sally the Witch and Ojamajo Doremi are not available to stream in the States.

@RiderStrike

@BWProwl

@LucasDeRuyter

@vestenet

Chris
Steve, it looks like the right amounts of eye of newt and toe of frog have been deposited in the cauldron to brew up another batch of serendipitous mini-trends in an anime season. Witch Watch emerged as an early charmer with an equally charming opening theme, but it turns out it's not the only broom-bound show in this bunch! Leaving viewers this season with the question: If not Witch Watch, which witch should we watch?

Steve
Right you are, Chris. It is a veritable season of the witch out there, so it's as good a time as any to don our floppiest hats and consider some hexes both new and old. Although yes, we can easily start with the new, because we have three separate spring titles with "witch" in their name. That's practically a coven! I already had the pleasure of dipping my toes into Witch Watch during our sampler last week, and I'm still quite bullish on that one. Any anime with a character who barfs confetti is off to a strong start in my books.

It still counts as the illustrious holder of the "This Season's Barf Anime" title even if that barf is paper-thin.

After seeing you and Lucas sing its praises, I happily inhaled all three episodes of Witch Watch available ahead of this column, and can confirm I'm having plenty of fun with it too! I respect it ditching any attempt at a conceit of Nico needing to hide her magic early on so that the comedy operates at Maximum Hijinks at all times. Witchy anime that use their magic for comic purposes are best when they have characters contract giganticism or fly around with no compunctions.

Its sheer commitment to its goofiness is by far its strongest asset. Or maybe its OP is, but besides that, it's the goofiness. Big and small. It's such a tiny thing, but I love that Morihito and his dad sport spiky ahoge as phenotypes of their ogre ancestry. That is spectacular character design.

I initially wanted to criticize Morihito for having the generic anime protagonist design, but that one horn and the lore behind it do a lot of heavy lifting. He's also a generally great dude as a rom-com protagonist. Witch Watch occupies the Magical Girlfriend subgenre of witchy shows, too, and works because I can buy Nico adorably swooning over this Momotaro-maligned meathead.

You must love dumbass-to-dumbass communication.

That scene at the end of the first episode with them firmly sold me on the show. They're so aligned in their goofy wavelength that Nico's magic is required to unlevel the playing field and leave Morihito to act the straight man. Sometimes both outnumbering and under-IQ-ing him.

The four mini-Nicos might be the most precious thing I've seen since the Platelets from Cells at Work.

That's one of the upshots of using witch magic for comedy in a series like this. It can do whatever the writing needs to be funny in the moment. It's an element that's been part of this anime genre since the beginning—or even before it, if you go by accounts of how the Bewitched sitcom's popularity in Japan begat so many of these magical mystery tours.

And given its iteration on that legacy, I think Witch Watch is easily the winning witch to watch this season. Although if we're grading solely on the rubric of using magic to throw whatever you want onto the screen, Maebashi Witches gives it a run for its money.

I had to remind myself this wasn't the SHAFT show airing this season.

One reason I brought up Bewitched and its legacy leading to witch anime is that one early Japanese series influenced by it, Sally the Witch, is also regularly recognized as the first magical girl anime. So there's been genre crossover between those since Day One, with Maebashi Witches being the one this season to most blatantly embody that. They also got idols, because why not?

Quite so. And Maebashi Witches is anything but coy about its hodgepodge of influences.

It's also somehow a tourism anime about the Gunma Prefecture, which I think is best exemplified by the heroine losing her shit at the sight of a cluster of municipal buildings in the premiere. That's silly but charming.

A lot is going on, and pretty as it is, I'm not sure how well all of it is gelling at the beginning. By the end of the first episode, the characters had mostly argued with themselves before deciding to simply sing and dance through their victim of the week's struggles, Balan Wonderworld style.

I enjoy a good maximalist mash-up, but that crazy train ain't quite on the level of the one from, say, Train to the End of the World.

It's more ambitious than good. Not to mention, it is exhausting to watch because it never lets itself breathe. Someone is always yapping about something. Still, it's weird and singular in ways I can respect, even if I don't enjoy the end product. My bigger issue with it, in terms of this column's subject, is its lack of traditional witch signifiers. No big hats, brooms, wands, or robes. I like a token ikemen girl as much as the next person, but if you put "witches" in your title, I'm looking for some very particular fashion choices.

I expected and respected how we'd both gravitate towards Kyoka, anyway.

Thanks for bringing up the broader point about fashion, since it's something that bears mentioning before we've even mentioned all three of Spring's witchy entries: none of the alleged witches leading these anime have one of those defining floppy, conical hats!

It feels like something of a...bait and witch.

Moving along to our third broom-adjacent anime of the season, we have Once Upon a Witch's Death, which at the very least prominently features a witch over 18.

No reaction? At least there's also one witch who is wearing the hat! Even if she isn't the lead.

Because our actual lead and titular doomed witch is one delightfully named Meg Raspberry, who I honestly think is taking the news better than could be expected.

So the premise of this one is that Meg needs to collect tears of joy from a thousand people (give or take) before the year is up, and she withers into dust from Jack [1996, directed by Francis Ford Coppola] disease. While that may seem like a perfect vehicle for an anthology of small, sentimental stories about everyday people dealing with everyday struggles, the execution is all over the place.

Chalk this up as another one I wanted to like more than I actually did. I don't know if the art and style of the show is enough to sell the inherent melancholy in the situations it's framing. I can buy some flippancy from Meg through her personality, but the atmosphere of the whole anime feels very simple and static.

Not ideal when you're trying to sell an audience on the tragedy and transience of life itself.

It has the same problem as Maebashi Witches. If it just let itself breathe for a few moments, it could better adapt to the emotional range it aims for. As-is, it comes across as insecure and cloying.

I'd be willing to forgive a bit more if Meg had a big hat.

I will say I respect her hopeless attempts at the game, anyway.

Utterly rizzless. You hate to see it.
Despite the quantity of witches this season, the overall quality is sadly lacking. But there's no need to hang up your broom in despair. The history of anime witches is long and storied with plenty of highlights. If we want to talk about cartoon witches in general, they've been an iconic part of the medium since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, if not earlier. That's almost a whole century of witches.

As I mentioned earlier, we have the first shoujo anime ever, 1966's Sally the Witch, to thank for progenerating both witches and magical girls in anime.

It's a lasting legacy dotted by a wide range of hats of varying degrees of hugeness and floppitude (a genuine scientific measurement of such things).

Sadly, it's one of those hugely influential anime that have never had much of a presence in America. That being said, Toei has a collection of screenshots buried in its website, and I just want to highlight how hard this one goes.

Why is Sally riding in a submarine piloted by another witch? I don't know, but I would love to find out.

Truly, we are being denied both art and culture. Witches and magical girls have a storied history just with Toei themselves. Ojamajo Doremi is another standard-bearer of the genre that you just can't stream anywhere here.

Meanwhile, the megaton model of modern magical girls, Precure, fully witched out back in 2016 with Mahoutsukai Precure, which we did relatively recently get running on Crunchyroll under the title Witchy Precure! It even got a sequel series last season!

They cop out by just having witch-hat-themed hairbands in magical girl mode, but at least Mirai and Liko wear the proper ensemble when they aren't transformed.

I'll allow it. While you can argue that all magical girls exist on the witch continuum, I appreciate these examples taking that extra aesthetic step. Of course, you also have examples like Madoka, which explicitly explores its internal dichotomy (and continuum) between magical girls and witches.

It's funny, and only a little annoying, how much Madoka codified that dichotomy for people who had less experience with the magical girl genre. As the examples I just listed showed, they generally overlap perfectly peacefully! Still, on its own merits, Madoka's treatment of witches is strong and works well within its dark exploration of magical girls. Plus one where I'm happy to withhold judgement over a lack of more traditional witchy signifiers, since the aesthetic of the Madoka Magica witches is so dang on-point.

I still like Madoka quite a lot, but it casts a shadow that can be difficult to separate from the show itself. Like you said, one of the neat things the magical girl genre does is take the traditionally maligned signifiers of witchdom and turn them into heroic traits. That's not unique to magical girls, but the genre adds to the statement. I'm also thinking about how Kiki's Delivery Service was my first Ghibli movie, and how it, too, used witches in a familiar but novel way.

Kiki's an icon in her own right, one you can see echoes of all the way into today's series like Witch Watch. Largely in the fashion sense, but still.

It's interesting, because Kiki's also deals with ideas that would resurface along the witchy magical girl line in series like Madoka, i.e.: magic and its permutations as symbology for growing up out of girlhood. Just not quite as darkly and violently as in Madoka.

I think watching Kiki at 10 or so and seeing all that blatant symbolism primed me for a fulfilling life full of anime witches. Not that all witch anime has to be serious symbolic business. Sometimes, it is enough to watch a tall girl in a huge hat, princess-carrying the male lead.

You'd mentioned Witch Craft Works ahead of us recording this column, so I went ahead and checked out its first episode to see if I could figure out why it could appeal to you so much.

It didn't take long.

To be completely transparent, I jumped on this topic almost exclusively because it would allow me to talk about Witch Craft Works, one of the greatest sleeper hits of the 2010s.

Here's one illuminating bit of trivia: the mangaka has gone on record saying that the story was originally drafted as a yuri series. They didn't even change the names when they ended up making it het (Honoka, as Love Live fans will know, is a traditionally girly name).

I'd call that a coward's move, but given the dynamic that's already led to between Honoka and Kagari, I can't deny that I don't see how it casts its own unique spell of appeal.

It's also got an ED that's flown across my feed in GIF form a couple of times, so props for sourcing that for me at last.

Look, this is the platonic ideal of a yuri premise turned straight. Its brain is huge. Also, the ED, with its superdeformed depictions of medieval torture devices, is an all-timer.

After all, it's not truly a witch anime unless there's a lot at...stake.

That's not where its musical delights end, either. Its accompanying singles and soundtracks all featured covers parodying Kraftwerk album art. Get it? Witch Kraftwerk? I love this stupid anime so much.

That's a worse/better pun than the one I just made (which still didn't get a response!). I respect that level of commitment to the bit. I can already see how Witch Craft Works deserved more spotlight on it at the time. Even as I was also pretty pleased with the other somewhat more visible witch-themed anime of the 2010s, myself.

Though I am also an established Trigger mark.

I'd say Little Witch Academia is probably the easiest Trigger anime to recommend. Just super solid and charming all the way through, with an especially lovable cast. It's even easier to recommend nowadays, when the general public might be jonesing for a story about a group of misfits at a magical academy that isn't funneling money into the pockets of a certain billionaire with too much time and cruelty on her hands.

We don't want to get too political or anything, but then, witches have always been tied up in the struggles of persecuted, vulnerable communities.

I mean, less controversially, it also has Sucy.

Good catch. If we went through this whole column without mentioning at least one witch who mained mushrooms, Lynzee would put us both on trial.

If there's one thing witches love, it's foraging for weird ingredients to put in stews, potions, and whatnot.

Flying Witch, incidentally, is a comfy iyashikei take on this broom-bound subject.

Also, in a media landscape dominated by isekai cowardice, Flying Witch is more commendable than ever for its episode about magic edibles that turn you into a furry.

Between this and Witch Craft Works's tall-lady princess-carry, there are a lot of different, very particular dreams these magic practitioners fulfilled. Speaking of isekai, it's at least worth a mention that the omnipresent genre is naturally going to include any number of witches in its fantasy settings. Even last season's significantly more subversive The Red Ranger Becomes an Adventurer in Another World included Yihdra and her respectable-sized hat in its co-protagonist position.

It could be a little floppier, but I understand the character designer may have been preoccupied with certain other parts of her costume.
But lest we let this column sink into magically enabled fetishistic depravity, we should highlight a nice and wholesome show like Maria the Virgin Witch.

I know Maria is one of those stories that plays off the persecuted roles that historical accounts of witches have occupied. To say nothing of musings on the pure femininity and girlhood embodied by magic as mentioned alongside Madoka earlier.

It's so much smarter than its title suggests. Not only does it have a sharp and bawdy sense of humor, but it's also explicitly and intelligently feminist. Like, Maria goes in some pretty severe directions and handles itself consistently well throughout. It includes a shockingly historically accurate portrayal of the Hundred Years' War on top of that. Yet another 2010s witch anime that doesn't get enough love.

As common as witches already seem to be, it makes you realize how prolific they have been in anime from the 60s up through the last couple of decades. Even a simple search for the term produces enough results on Crunchyroll alone to fill a dozen of these columns, drilled down to specific subgenres!

Want witches, but as a fantasy war story? There's Izetta the Last Witch. Witches, but it's Bleach? Burn the Witch is here for you. Witch starring in a Kino-like? Wandering Witch has you covered, with a truly impressively floppy hat!

Sound off with your favorite anime witches and witchy anime in the comments! As much as we'd like to do so, there's no way we can cover all of these covens in one column. Still, we cooked up a good cauldron's worth of sorceresses here.

We had a lot to talk about, to be sure. Hopefully, we can count on our erstwhile editors to carefully go over this mass of magical material with... spell check?!

That's it, I'm siccing the Sucy army on you.