This Week in Anime

Which Anime Witch Is This?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I appreciate the way it demonstrates how witches can work, slotted into just about any genre of anime. Flying Witch is about as far from Madoka's witches as you can get, yet they both feel valid.

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.

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.

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!

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?!