The Spring 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Once Upon a Witch's Death

On Meg's seventeenth birthday, she learns she only has one year left to live. Her mentor—the Eternal Witch, Faust—explains that she is cursed and the only way to save herself is to grow a seed of life using one thousand tears of joy. Of course, such tears aren't easy to come by. As Meg begins her quest, she finds herself drawn into the lives of her friends and neighbors in ways she never imagined. By sharing their burdens and using her magic to comfort them, she learns how precious those moments of connection can be, even in the face of death.

Once Upon a Witch's Death is based on the light novel series by author Saka and illustrator Chorefuji. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Tuesdays.

We've already gotten Mushoku Tensei but Aggressively Mediocre, but time for another version of a glossy, acclaimed that I detest: Violet Evergarden but Aggressively Mediocre, also known as Once Upon a Witch's Death. Okay, this one doesn't have as many specific similarities; it's more about the vibes: a young woman is forced to go out in the world and witness other people's experiences for reasons, to maudlin results. This time, the young girl is Meg Raspberry, a 17-year-old witch who learns from her master “Yubaba from Spirited Away but the ‘after’ version in a diet commercial,” that she's cursed to wither away rapidly and die on her 18th birthday one year from that day. Why? Big shrug!

While I am no fan of Violet Evergarden, I must acknowledge that it knew how to drive home its emotional highs and lows—perhaps a little too well. In Once Upon a Witch's Death, Meg contemplates her mortality for a few minutes before going on a jaunty stroll through town and encountering a little girl looking for flowers to give to her mommy who was sick but now is “resting for a really long time” and will “never wake up again.” Gasp… what could that possibly mean? She's in a coma, right? RIGHT??

Just kidding, and the weak attempt at building tension just left me bored and waiting for the episode to end, as is the super obvious mystery of what the “pretty pink” flowers she's looking for are. We learn little about the family involved except that the mom and dad liked to travel, so I truly did not care when they held each other and cried at the mother's grave. The extremely middling animation may be an improvement for EMT Squared compared to a couple of years ago, but it still failed to strengthen the emotional impact of the story in any way. The only part of the production that showed any competence was the musical score, thanks to the talent of Yuki Kajiura—I especially enjoyed the bouncy accompaniment to Meg going through her morning routine, straight out of the first scenes of a teen movie. Even the theme song, performed by Maaya Sakamoto, felt like something I'd heard dozens of times before.

There were some decent moments, such as the moment at the end when diet Yubaba tells Meg the tears she collected were grief and joy mingled. Still, if Once Upon a Witch's Death wants to pull this off, it needs to be more willing to sit in a moment of powerful emotion before whisking off to the next one.

Watching this episode, I kind of felt like I was being conned. Part of it was the downright blatant attempt to play on my emotions. I mean, a young girl with a dead mom who seems not to understand the concept of death and wants to give her mom flowers so she can rest better… that's some serious manipulation right there. However, the real issue isn't that the show is attempting to elicit an emotional reaction—that's pretty much the goal of all fiction. No, the problem is that the situation, while objectively sad, is also painfully cliché. There's no real twist on the formula. The drama plays out beat-for-beat exactly as you would expect.

Then we get the other issue with this episode: the entire premise feels false. I'm not sure that I believe that Meg is going to die in a year. Apparently, Meg has had this curse since birth—a curse that will kill her shortly after she turns 18. The only way to hold off the curse is by making an immortality potion (one she will have to keep making and taking at regular intervals forever) that can only be made by bringing pure joy to a thousand people.

The only evidence of such a curse (or such a cure) is the word of one of the seven most powerful witches in the world—and the more she talks about Meg's curse, the more fake it seems. Faust claims that she never told Meg about the curse because, without a sense of urgency, Meg would just procrastinate. However, as of now, Meg has only 365 days to make 1,000 people experience pure joy; that's close to three people a day! What an insane goal.

Simply put, all this feels like a final test for Meg as Faust's apprentice. Meg has basically learned all the magic she needs to become a powerful witch. What now needs to be taught is how to use that power. Thus, Faust has created a situation that forces Meg to use her powers for good—likely in the hopes that this will show the young witch all the good she can do in the world and the personal/emotional reward that comes along with it. The curse could very well not exist at all! And while this may or may not be the case, it certainly feels like it to me, which has utterly drained any and all tension from the plot in my eyes.

All that said, I don't feel like this is a bad show. It looks above-average visually and is well-acted. However, it doesn't really draw me in either. So, in the end, I'm going to just give it a middle-of-the-road score and move on.

About halfway through the premiere of Once Upon a Witch's Death, our protagonist, Meg Raspberry, narrates, “Apparently, I lost both of my parents when I was little. I say ‘apparently’ because I have no memories of them.” There is some vaguely wistful music playing on the soundtrack, and we're meant to connect this tragic void in our heroine's life with the looming family tragedy of the little girl Meg must help to get the first magical tear that she (Meg) will need to keep from dying in a year. The problem is, Meg conveys this information with all of the emotion and depth of your great aunt telling you what the weather was like during her recent trip to the dog park with Snuffles. It gets the point across, sure, but there is simply no ignoring that sinking feeling that everyone involved in this exchange is simply filling dead air and killing time.

Once Upon a Witch's Death is, in other words, a show that is not so much notable for being “bad” as it is simply “not good.” The protagonist is blandly chipper and sweet in a way that will leave no lasting impression whatsoever; the character designs and animation achieve the impression of motion without actually providing a single standout visual or scene; the writing is chock-full of cliches and platitudes, so the audience will doubtless be able to follow along with what is happening, but they will be very hard-pressed to actually care. Meg is going to die in a year unless she gets a bunch of feel-good tears on account of all her kind actions. I've seen this show before, when it was called 100 Deeds for Eddie McDowd, and I liked it much better when the main character actually had a personality and some inner conflicts to work through (and he was also a cute pooch).

There's that indefinable but all-important quality that even the most purely functional show needs to have to become truly watchable. It goes by many names: The Sauce, The Juice, The Right Stuff, The “It” Factor, The Razzamatazz, etc. Whatever you call “it”, Once Upon a Witch's Death most certainly does not have “it”. The show is inoffensive to look at and easy enough to sit through for a few minutes, but so is your average laundry cycle. That doesn't mean you should dedicate a half-hour of your life every week to making it appointment viewing.

It's never a good idea to overplay your hand, especially not in the first episode. I'm not entirely sure that Once Upon a Witch's Death is doing that in the strictest sense, but it still seems as if it's getting there. Heroine Meg Raspberry is no sooner slammed with the revelation that she only has a year to live when she bumps into Anna, a little girl in town, who tells her that her “mommy was in the hospital, but she left and is sleeping now.” Meg's first task in order to prevent her own death is, naturally, to help Anna and her father Hendy cope with their own recent loss. The implication is that, prior to this moment, Meg didn't fully understand what death meant. In a flashback, we see her remarking that she thinks her parents died, but she has no memory of them, so she's not really affected by their loss. Even when she's told by her master, Faust, that she herself is doomed to die, she only thinks of it in terms of no longer existing. But her interactions with Anna and Hendy serve as a demonstration that death leads to grief, thereby showing Meg the importance of life.

It's not terrible, no matter how I feel about lying to children about what “dead” means. And I do like that Anna reveals to Meg that, despite her dad's use of euphemisms, she's fully aware that her mom's never coming back – it demonstrates that the story understands not to talk down to viewers on some level. But it also has an air of triteness that undercuts the plot. I wouldn't expect Meg to know how to react when faced with news of her impending demise; she's seventeen and never really thought about it, plus it comes entirely out of the blue. But there's “not processing” and “not giving any space to process,” and that's where this gets a bit stuck. Meg isn't allowed the time to think about what she's learned; she's shunted almost directly into her meeting with Anna and her revelation about loss. The episode is so busy trying to set up the rest of the plot that we don't get a chance to think about what we've already seen. Will it be important that she's got a crush on a girl named Fine? Probably. Did we need her to be introduced right now? I have my doubts.

Still, there are some positives to be found. Carbuncle the ferrety creature is adorable, and the scene of Meg feeding all of the family pets looks like breakfast time at my house, especially since we've added another cat to the clowder. The world building is at least moderately interesting, since it appears to take place in our world with the addition of magic, and the scene in front of Iris' grave is at least a little touching. I don't love Meg herself, but I could see this improving as it goes on if it gives itself some space to breathe.