The Spring 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Maebashi Witches

First-year high school student Yuina Akagi lives an ordinary but unsatisfying everyday life in Maebashi City in Gunma Prefecture. One day, a mysterious frog named Keroppe scouts her and four other girls to become the "Maebashi Witches." Suddenly, a room closet is connected to a mysterious space that brings the girls to a magical flower shop where they sing, dance, and make other people's wishes come true.

Maebashi Witches is an original anime project. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Sundays.

I genuinely don't know what to make of Maebashi Witches. On its face, it's a strange blend of genres traditionally aimed at little girls: magical girls, witches, and idols. The dysfunctional team also works out of an enchanted florist shop, which is a common career goal for young girls in Japan. But also, it airs in a late-night time slot, and there are plenty of shows aimed at adult male audiences that love to play on the expectations that come with the signifiers of a young female demographic.

The entire episode I felt on edge—the introduction had warned me to stay on my toes when Azu tackled Yuina right as she inhaled for the first notes of her song, contrasting with the almost doll-like formalism up until that point. Yuina is right that there are vibes, but I don't think she's noticed that there's something off about them. Like how Yuina seems to be obsessed with influencer culture, including a dress that's so popular on TikTok that I've seen YouTube videos about it, but is taking pictures with a disposable film camera and putting them on her wall instead of social media. Or the girls' discussion about institutional sexism concluding with Yuina announcing they should help their first client—a high school girl who feels conflicted about applying to medical school against her parents' wishes—by singing a song about believing in yourself and fighting the status quo to lift her spirits.

But could it just be a straightforward magical girl/witch/idol show with strange direction and writing? I don't know.

Regardless of what's down the road, the first episode of Maebashi Witches was an outright assault on my senses. Yuina is an admitted chatterbox, and her voice actress's shrill tones and constant repetition of, “Emo! Emo!” (translated as “Vibes” in the subtitles) felt like a drill boring into my skull. There's an extended scene of the cast outlined in blue while standing in a white-and-grey void that I swear worsened the eye strain I developed while watching Classic Stars.

I am curious about what path Maebashi Witches will take. Will it do something original… or at least weird? Or is it exactly what it claims to be? I doubt I'll try to find out for myself, but I'll pay attention to the conversation around it.

I like this show much more on paper than in reality. It sounds like a fun combination of genres – magical girls, witches, and idols, with a soupçon of regional tourism for good measure. And it is, in fact, all of those things: in Maebashi, a weird frog-thing with a zipper in his back is collecting girls to train as witches. They get to transform and sing songs to help people grant their wishes. It sounds delightful.

Regretfully, I didn't find the reality as entrancing as the premise. In large part that's because our main girl, perky pink-haired Yuina, is intensely annoying. She herself knows it: at one point she remarks that people say she gets more irritating the longer you spend with her. The rest of the cast may eventually be able to balance her out, but this first episode is primarily The Yuina Show, and the other two girls who get the most screen time also have their issues – Azu is snooty and selfish, while Choco is intended to be endearing but just comes across as not too bright. The two remaining cast members, Kyoka and Mai, seem a little more balanced, but that also appears to make them uninteresting to the writers, who don't give them quite enough to do this week.

Of course, all of this could very well be intentional. Keroppe, who comments that the name Yuina gives him is treading close to copyright laws, is very overt about the action of the show. He's not quite winking at the audience, but he makes a lot of cracks that make it clear this is at least a little metafictional. He flings himself into his role as mascot character with mad abandon, asking if Yuina wants the full show when he explains things, and stopping, rewinding, and fast-forwarding the episode a few times. He's also very good with the girls, which is nice to see. When Azu has a snit about Yuina taking charge, he explains that it's not that she's in charge, but that she has the best, clearest imagination of the five, something that lets the cooler heads of Kyoka and Mai prevail.

None of this helps the pacing of the story, nor the way it feels like a video game. I was surprised that this isn't a game tie-in, but an original series, because it looks and acts very much like it comes from (or with) one. Perhaps I was thrown by Keroppe's winking mentions that he lost the “witch gacha.” In any event, while this does look good in places and uses its color-coding well (although I'm a little confused by the top of Azu's dress), it doesn't really come together into an enjoyable whole. It's a good idea executed with some serious flaws.

If any of you out there have been praying for a reprieve from the concentrated cuteness convergence that this spring season has turned out to be…well, I have bad news for both you and your average blood-sugar levels. In fact, I would bet money that the animators working on Maebashi Witches used paints made of melted cotton candy and liquefied jelly beans to color pretty much every frame of this episode. For goodness' sake, the actual episode description for this episode on Crunchyroll is, “Yuina meets a talking frog and becomes a witch apprentice. Now she must make flowers bloom in people's hearts.” Yeah, well, I sure hope Yuina and her cadre of witches offer complimentary glucose monitors with their services, not to mention a cash handout to compensate for the impending explosion of their clients' insurance premiums.

Wait a minute, I forgot where this show takes place. Never mind about the “cash handout” part of that joke. The Japanese can actually afford to visit a doctor and get diagnosed with an illness without the fear of going bankrupt. That sure must be nice.

Okay, fine, Maebashi Witches is not actually about the fundamentally broken infrastructure of America's joke of a health-care system. It's about cute girls who transform into even cuter versions of themselves thanks to weird frog magic and use their Satanic powers to light up the lives of regular people with song and dance. While it is very possible that their frog mascot could turn out to be a real Kerokero-bey and reveal himself to be an Eldritch God of Nightmares and Misery in a few episodes, this first episode plays things completely straight. We meet Yuina, we meet all of the other multicolored hairdos that are destined to be her magical teammates, and then they all transport a girl into an insane realm of Dadaist fantasy imagery to solve all of her problems with a pop-idol music video.

To be clear, I think all of this is pretty rad. So far as candy-coated anime junk-food is concerned, Maebashi Witches seems intent on inducing us the most exquisitely produced sugar-coma in medical history. It's got funny jokes, it's got decent characters, but most of all, it's got Pizzaz with a capital “Z.” The art and animation here is honestly quite stunning, most of the time, so I was never bored or frustrated with this show, even when I couldn't be bothered to care that much about the story being told. This is sheer, unabashed pop spectacle, and I respect the work Maebashi Witches has put into being the sparkliest, shiniest, toe-tapping-est version of itself. So long as you remember to manage your consumption of such sugary treats and balance your anime diet with the usual blood-n'-guts and shonen beat-em-ups, then this should make a fine addition to any magical girl fan's seasonal lineup.