Fantasy anime are back in a big way, with shows like Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End and Sentenced to be a Hero dominating both ends of the melancholic and action-heavy sides of the spectrum over on Crunchyroll. But if you’re an anime fan who loves Harry Potter but abhors the person behind it to the point that you rightfully don’t want to support anything of its ilk, when we tell you that Crunchyroll just dropped a new trailer for Witch Hat Atelier, know that your prayers for a series that does its formula even better will soon be answered.
Witch Hat Atelier, created by Kamome Shirahama and adapted by Bug Films (Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead), tells the tale of a fantasy world where magic exists but only for a certain few. Not because they were born gifted as some child of prophecy, but because magic is basically kept under lock and key from ordinary folks because of how much more dangerous a world where everyone could wield its power would be. Still, Coco, a precious little cinnamon roll of a young lady, dreams of one day becoming a witch. But as the old saying goes, careful what you wish for, she stumbles upon the secret to magic. Turns out all you have to do is draw symbols on a piece of paper, just like what she saw in her picture books gifted to her by a person of mysterious origin when she was three apples tall.
Easy enough? Well, when Coco tries to shoot off her first spell, she ends up petrifying her entire home, mother included, because she accidentally cast a forbidden spell. But not all is lost for her, and she is put under the gentle guiding wing of Qifrey, a kind, benevolent witch who takes her on as his apprentice in the hopes they can one day save her mother. Though to get there, Coco has to learn how to get along with her fellow apprentices as well as the complex world of witches she so abruptly thrust herself into.
Fantasy anime that hews close to Harry Potter‘s magic-school formula has become pretty commonplace, with anime like Mashle: Magic and Muscles and Wistoria: Wand and Sword, as well as manga like Ichi the Witch, borrowing some conventions that lapsed Potter fans don’t have to squint very hard to notice. But what makes Witch Hat Atelier—a series I’d put up there with Delicious in Dungeon and Frieren as a pseudo big three of good old-fashioned fantasy, without all the isekai fixings—your guaranteed next anime obsession isn’t just how beautifully animated the show is, the fact that veteran Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring and Dark Souls composer Yuka Kitamura is crafting its score, or even how adoptable its witches-in-training are, but how imaginative its magic system is.
As mentioned up top, the secret to magic in Witch Hat is drawing. So witches in the series draw from pens on makeshift parchment paper they can dispense in a cowboy-like quick draw to illustrate complex symbols or, if you’ve got Batman levels of preparation, pre-make a bunch of spell symbols where all you need to do is draw the final connective line to shoot off spells that can have you levitating, shooting off elemental blasts, and more. As such, the only way to get better at magic is to get one’s penmanship game up, which is something Coco capital “S” struggles with as a late bloomer to magic, trying to keep up with her fellow witches.
“I wanted the readers to feel the difficulties of trying to master the artistry or the magic,” Shirahama previously told io9 about the series’ approach to arcane penmanship. “Sometimes there’s a simpler way to do something. Those are the kind of aspects that I wanted to bring out in this worldview.
Seeing Coco’s eyebrows bunch up with determination to draw will leave your heart swelling with the pride of a parent when she has her big moments—whether it’s in the heat of battle against giant beasties she’s way too green to fight or in trials to get even closer to becoming a bona fide witch. The manga, and by proxy the show, will get even darker when it explores the obvious follow-up question to its magic system by answering what happens when you draw spells on things that aren’t inanimate objects. Serendipitously, the series also feels like it’s coming out at just the right time as the craft of drawing continues to be bastardized by AI, giving folks who hate slop even more reason to watch this show, pump their fist, and yell, “Hell yeah!” anytime they see Coco and crew do their thing.
“I feel like, as an artist, I did put a similar kind of effort as Coco did to fulfill my dream to become an artist. In that sense, I feel like my effort was successful, and so I tried to project a positive perspective onto Coco in that sense. The reason why I used magic as a metaphor [for] creativity [is] that there are so many ways you can be expressing your creativity,” Shirahama continued in our previous interview. “Whether using TikTok or YouTube or anything that you post on social media is an expression. However, there’s a dangerous side to releasing these expressions into the world on the internet. I think expression always comes with a responsibility, and this is a point that I wanted to make in the series.”
Witch Hat Atelier‘s stunning new trailer also comes as proof of the power of the artistic magic that can happen when a studio takes its time to cook just a little bit longer on a show, even if it means delaying it. Such was the case last September, when Bug Films announced a delay to improve the quality of its animation. Usually, when this sort of thing happens, it’s cause for alarm that a show, especially one that had a bit of radio silence between its 2022 announcement and 2024 Anime Expo trailer, fans start to sweat thinking the worst: that the show will go the way of Adult Swim‘s disastrous Uzumaki anime. But thankfully, the show’s producers showed awareness, at the very least, of how daunting it would be to adapt Shirahama’s original manga panel framing and artistry so that the anime wouldn’t just be good-looking, but be as big as The Lord of the Rings in the anime industry.
Needless to say, that boast is as tall an order for any show to live up to, but from what we know about the series having the juice and what we’ve just seen of the new trailer’s stunning cuts of animation and picturesque background art, Witch Hat Atelier looks like it’s got the makings of a must-watch anime fans will be obsessed with when it premieres on Crunchyroll this April.
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