Simply put, Witch Hat Atelier is a beautiful anime. For those who love visually spectacular magic and fantasy settings, Witch Hat Atelier is required watching this season. In many respects, Kamone Shirahama’s work is impressive, but what stood out to me most when I first started the manga years ago was its artwork. I’m not alone in thinking this; comments on how incredible and detailed the art of the series is is one of the most common things noted in people’s reviews of the manga. In fact, when I interviewed Shirahama-sensei and staff for the anime adaptation, Director Ayumu Watanabe noted that adapting this particular work “seemed like a very reckless venture” because of how much it would take to maintain that artistic depth when adapting the manga into anime.
BUG FILMS, the animation studio behind the Witch Hat Atelier anime, is no stranger to visually stunning projects though. They’re the same studio behind Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead which had an incredible start (though I think this anime has it beat thus far). Admittedly, due to some of the production issues associated with Zom 100, I was a bit concerned for Witch Hat Atelier. The animation shown in the preview was amazing, and, given the timing of the anime release was pushed forward to this year after originally being planned for earlier, it seems BUG FILMS wanted the extra time to create a superior adaptation. If the first two episodes of Witch Hat Atelier are any indication of what’s to come, I think they’ve succeeded.
What is Witch Hat Atelier?
For those unfamiliar with Witch Hat Atelier, the concept is an inventive angle on what seems ordinary on the surface. Within the world of the series, being a witch is an inherent quality. In other words, only people born with an aptitude for magic can cast it. The opening page of the manga asks if athletes, astronauts, or pop stars always what they were from birth, or if it was something they eventually became. In a world where being a witch seems especially deterministic, young girl Coco dreams of becoming one while doing her chores. When a witch named Qifrey visits her village, Coco uncovers the “absolute secret” of magic, becomes Qifrey’s apprentice, and begins her studies.
The notion of only some people being born with magical abilities isn’t new. While the exact way that Shirahama-sensei transforms this concept is something you’ll need to watch the series to understand, suffice to say that the limitations of the world around Coco aren’t quite as they seem. Her fascination with magic is a central aspect of the series and a useful tool for simultaneously characterizing her and introducing magic to the audience. She, at times, acts as a proxy for audience questions, with her natural thoughts on magic serving as an expository vehicle without feeling overly forced.
I mention Coco so much alongside the synopsis so heavily because, while this may seem like an obvious trait of a main character, she really is emblematic of the entire franchise. This isn’t to say the other characters aren’t fantastic in their own right; many of them and their side stories are more popular than the core story. What I mean when I say she is emblematic of Witch Hat Atelier is that she possesses a unique adolescent, often naive, and fundamental appreciation for in way that is perfectly primed for exploring it — both its good outcomes and its bad. Like magic, she isn’t something that has been colored a particular way, but rather has the potential to go in a lot of different directions.
For those interested in the technical aspects of the world and its magic system, Witch Hat Atelier‘s is hard magic, with strict rules, limitation, and relatively consistent mechanics. It’s robust, interesting, and predictable in a good way.
While much of this may not sound groundbreaking, I assure you this: the most ordinary aspects of the series are executed in extraordinary ways. And the extraordinary aspects of the series are already extraordinary to begin with.
A Spectacle on Screen
I won’t spoil anything about the story, and luckily I don’t have to in order to communicate how impressive the anime’s art is. Within roughly the first 45 second of the anime, the book / ink motifs start, and the anime opens by literally constructing the scene on the pages of a book and sending the viewer into it. That visual pattern is used at different points of entry into the first two episodes, and it feels like a tacit appreciation of the source material while also tapping into the feelings of nostalgia and wonder one feels when reading a fantasy novel.
One of the more immediate details you notice when reading Witch Hat Atelier is the level of detail put into clothing, such as the folds, shadows, and layers of Coco’s clothes in the earliest pages. While the anime doesn’t take on the herculean task of literally replicating every bit of detail in Shirahama-sensei’s work, it does maintain a good degree of the detail when it comes to lighting and shadow in the anime.
This felt especially true when it came to character’s eyes and expressions. Eyes in this series truly carry an amount of life that makes the characters themselves feel even more alive than they look. Backgrounds don’t get ignored in the anime either and have plenty of detail. The quality from the PVs and initial videos was definitely maintained in the first two episodes. And, the Witch Hat Atelier anime took advantage of opportunities to shine where the manga couldn’t, especially in making early scenes feel dynamic and make the movements of characters feel and look natural.
There is one particular scene in the first episode where Coco prepares a bit of fabric that I think is very well done and serves as a good representation of something important in the world of Witch Hat Atelier: precision and mastery. This is an anime where movements are careful and have consequences and, because of this, the detail of how characters approach and perform a task are incredibly important. Also, Coco has a rather unique habit of excitedly jumping and moving around at times, something the anime opted to keep and animate pretty well — though there is one sequence during a conversation with Qifrey that is notably less fluid than the rest.
In addition to the aspects of animation like Coco running down some stairs or sheets billowing in the wind, the anime of course has its own approach to showcasing magic. Magic in Witch Hat Atelier always had life to it, but the anime really succeeds in adding color, motion, and vibrancy to it. We only see a subset of spells in the first couple of episodes, but magic in the anime had two qualities to it that especially stuck out to me. One, magic is very luminescent.
Both the original manga and the anime use a technique where light from magic is made more impactful via its reflecting off of nearby surfaces like eyes. Secondly, and more difficult to explain, magic feels like natural matter. It has weight to it, it trails off, different spells have their own velocity, and it can feel like a very mechanical aspect to a scene. The latter part came up for me in the second episode, where a lot of the more casual uses of magic felt dare I say Ghibli-esque. I think you’ll find some scenes (especially those related to cooking and household tasks) similar to a scene out of Howl’s Moving Castle.
Incredible Voice Acting and Sound
One question I was especially grateful to have the opportunity to ask Shirahama-sensei and the anime staff was what kind of voice they envisioned for Coco. Director Watanabe-san and Producer Hiroaki Kojima-san both gave prescient answers: that Coco would need to be a voice that doesn’t have a lot of color, something I understood to mean that perhaps a newer voice actor would be chosen for the role, something Producer Kojima-san mused about. In that sense, Rena Motomura is a strong choice for Coco. But, what surprised me most about her performance, especially given how new she is to the industry, was how damn good and dynamic it was. Motomura-san’s first named role was from an anime that just aired last year, but she sounds incredible.
Without spoiling, a lot happens in the first couple of episodes of the anime and a wide range of emotions and expressions are covered. The naive wonder of Coco, her excitableness, her terror — all of these things are captured well. One scream in particular genuinely gave me chills. The voice actors selected for the students who appear in the first two episodes are, for the most part, newer voice actors, which aligns well with the characters themselves being up-and-coming. The exception to this is Agott’s voice actor Hibiku Yamamura, who has been active since around 2007. Though, when considering Agott’s character, that also makes sense.
The casting choice I was most surprised by initially was the decision to have Natsuki Hanae, who is most well known for voicing shonen characters like Tanjiro and Okarun, as Qifrey. But, once I actually heard him as Qifrey, I began to think it worked out very well. Hanae-san has great range and Qifrey in no way sounds adolescent in the way Tanjiro and Okarun do. If anything, I think that since Qifrey is notably younger than the typical older with/wizard that main characters usually first encounter in this type of story, it makes sense to not give him some sort of booming, deep voice.
Lastly on sound: the music. It’s so beautiful and it fits so well. I’m honestly a sucker for any fantasy-genre music, but the ability this anime’s music has to convey a feeling of lightness and nostalgia was great. Those in North America have the opportunity to see a screening of the episodes in theaters today and I shall be joining them if for no other reason than to hear the sounds of Witch Hat Atelier on theater quality speakers. Yuka Kitamura has composed music for games like Dark Souls and Elden Ring that always have an immersive quality to them. This is more than the case for Witch Hat Atelier as well. As for the sound effects, the production on them doesn’t fall short of the music either, especially for dynamic moments where a lot of magic is competing for real estate in the watcher’s ears.
An Interesting Start for Characters
This will be the shortest section as, obviously, going too much into the story will venture into spoiler territory. Also, since this is only a review of the first two episodes, the main person who has had a substantial start of an arc of any kind is Coco. Thus far though, there are a good collection of characters that all have unique personalities. In the past Shirahama-sensei said to me “When developing characters I like to think about their flaws first.” This is something that comes through in the case of the children introduced in the first and second episode. Some scenes even have some subtle differences from the manga to convey a different tone or relational aspect between multiple characters and emphasize different parts of their respective personalities.
Because the flaws themselves are distinct, the characters feel that way too. And, for characters like Qifrey, who lack the growing adolescent element to them, we still get to see some different elements of his personality and a range of emotions that I found gratifying for a seasoned-mage style of character.
Looking Forward to the Future of Witch Hat Atelier
This premiere is a very clear 9 / 10 in general and may even deserve closer to a 10 if I rate it solely in terms of what a premiere is meant to accomplish. What holds it back are very sporadic moments where the fluidity of animation could be improved (like the conversation with Qifrey mentioned earlier) and the fact that Episode 2 was a bit less impressive than Episode 1 in my opinion (though both were still fantastic). In terms of its art, I don’t know if its possible for an anime to ever realistically match the quality of the panels from Shirahama-sensei’s original work. But, I think the Witch Hat Atelier anime does an incredible job of adapting it into anime and enhancing it in ways only anime can.
Most of all, I’m excited for what’s to come from this anime. I haven’t read the entirety of the manga, so I can’t speak to the entire story, but I do know that much of what’s soon to come is quite good. For now, I’ll patiently wait for the official April 6 premiere so I can keep watching what is sure to be one of the best fantasy anime released in years. Is this Spring 2026’s visual masterpiece? Absolutely.
Featured image: ©Kamome Shirahama/KODANSHA/ Witch Hat Atelier Committee
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