Witch Watch premiered on Netflix in Japan on April 6 to much anticipation from dedicated manga readers of the series. Witch Watch is an adaptation of a comedy manga of the same name by Kenta Shinohara. The manga runs in English on the official Shounen Jump phone app and began serialization in Japan via Weekly Shonen Jump on February 7, 2021. The anime was heavily advertised online and at this year’s AnimeJapan event, but does the premiere live up to the hype?
About a year ago, I decided to give the Witch Watch manga a try. After all, I was a huge fan of Shinohara’s other work, Kanata no Astra, a sci-fi mystery manga. Witch Watch, being a comedy, completely strays from Shinohara’s previous manga, much to my surprise.
He’s great at sci-fi and mystery but perhaps wanted to try his hand at a lighthearted comedy. I jumped into Witch Watch with high expectations after enjoying Kanata no Astra. Unfortunately, I dropped the manga just a few chapters in. I wasn’t feeling the characters or the story and just didn’t find the comedy appealing. But there are times when a manga doesn’t cut it for me, but the anime adaptation does. When the Witch Watch anime was announced, I decided that I’d give it a shot.
Witch Watch follows a young witch named Nico and her childhood friend, Morihito Otogi, or “Moi”. After spending six years studying magic at a faraway academy, Nico is determined to use her magic to help people. She chooses Moi Otogi as her familiar, contrary to witches usually picking animals as their familiars. Moi has his own supernatural abilities too, as he’s from a long line of Oni.
The first episode of Witch Watch throws a lot of information at you very quickly—almost too quickly. We hastily get established with Moi’s identity as an Oni, his past dealing with bullies (a cliché for Oni characters), and that his father is going away on an overseas trip. We also learn about Nico and her prophesied tragedy that is to come to her within one year.
It would have been more interesting if the story introduced Nico and Moi a bit more before trying to force the audience to feel sorry for them. I don’t even like Moi as a character yet—he’s boring and doesn’t seem to like anything or have hobbies. So far he’s just a generic male character with no personality, and unfortunately we see this too often in anime for male characters. Maybe he’ll open up and get more interesting, but I get why he was bullied when he was young.
The humor in Witch Watch falls flat. And I’m not just making a joke about Nico using her magic to turn herself as flat as a piece of paper and literally fly into the wind. The scenarios are ridiculous, but not in the My Deer Friend Nokotan way. We aren’t seeing schoolgirls with antlers bust through doorways, crumbling the infrastructure, resulting in bloodying students (that scene got shared all over social media for a reason).
From Nico crashing into Moi’s house to turning herself flat to making their shopping bags lighter to carry—nothing sticks out. Nothing feels unique. Nico is cute; I’ll give her that much, and voice actress Rina Kawaguchi puts on the perfectly quirky performance that Nico needs. But for a comedy anime, I’m sure not doing a lot of laughing.
The opening theme, “Watch me!,” which was played at the end of Episode 1, is performed by YOASOBI and was probably my favorite part of the episode. Bibury Animation Studio is handling the animation, and it’s better than you may expect from the studio if you’ve seen The Quintessential Quintuplets 2 and its movie. While nothing too over-the-top happens in episode one, there aren’t any awkward pauses in animation and no out-of-place, wonky facial expressions.
The use of color is a nice touch in an otherwise boring setting (it’s just generic Japan from what I can tell). Unfortunately, the animation and theme songs aren’t enough for me to pull this anime out of my 5/10 rating so far.
I’m curious enough about the story to look forward to next week’s episode. Just what is this demise coming to Nico in a year? And what about Moi? Actually, I really don’t care about Moi at all so far.
It’s only Episode 1, but as far as first impressions go, I wasn’t sold on Witch Watch. I’ll tune in next week and just hope there’s something more to go on with other than “Waifu is cute”. You can watch Witch Watch on both Netflix and Crunchyroll in available regions.
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©Kenta Shinohara/Shueisha, Witch Watch Production Committee, MBS
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