I love anime witches – Whether they’re in comfy stories like Kiki’s Delivery Service or Flying Witch or more adventurous affairs like Little Witch Academia, I just think they’re nifty, especially around this time of year. Usually cute girls (though you do get boy witches and older witches sometimes), and always with the mystical powers and big pointy hats, they show up most often in Urban Fantasy settings, whether out in the open or keeping their powers secret from the world. Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches didn’t really live up to the “Witch” concept, which I don’t hold against it, but for a hefty serving of witchy goodness, I’m going to take a look at Witch Craft Works.
Witch Craft Works is an Urban Fantasy,
that sort of has an action/adventure vibe going on, but bent strongly
towards comedic insanity rather than dangerous drama. If you need an
example, then how about it starting with the male lead, Honoka
Takamiya, finding a note in the trash he’s taking out warning him of
falling school buildings just before the main school building nearly
falls on him. Though he avoids getting squashed, he’s soon set upon
by a strange girl with animal ears and a white witch cloak and hat
and her army of robot rabbits.
And yet this is probably the point of
the show that you can most take seriously. It only gets goofier in
the following episodes. Ayaka Kagari, the school’s “Princess” –
a girl of great beauty, amazonian stature, and few words who is an
object of worship for most of the student body – appears to defend
Takamiya, pulling out her own (red) witch ensemble and enough literal
firepower to deal with the bunny-robot legions piling in on them,
surviving countless blows with seemingly no permanent harm done.
Ultimately, she forces the animal-ears witch to retreat.
Honoka, for his part, had no idea about
any of this witches and magic stuff before this incident, so the
entire affair comes as quite the surprise. Kagari also calls him her
“princess”, vowing to protect him. But from what? Well, it’s
time to look at the conflict of Witch Craft Works… or should I say
conflicts?
Because, as much as there’s a main plot
full of witches, magic, and mayhem, there’s also a lot of time
devoted to their normal (really, decidedly abnormal) school life.
Kagari, for instance, comes to insist that Honoka have lunch with
her… a position that there is normally a massive reservation
waiting list for, drawing the ire of fellow students who see him
cutting in line to be with the Princess unfairly. This material
would be done better in the Manga “Komi Can’t Communicate” but
it’s the main focus there and a sideshow here, and for a sideshow it
actually provides some fairly reliable humor.
A good amount of this is based on
Kagari. A lot like Shiraishi from Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches,
Kagari is not the kind of girl who emotes or necessarily talks a lot.
Unlike Shiraishi, Kagari is actually fairly easy to read, as she is
even more straightforwardly direct about what she’s interested in
when she chooses to speak, and she actually gets a whole lot of
character across.
This is because while Yamada-kun and
the Seven Witches was a usually light affair with frequent comedy, it
was a tragic melodrama compared to Witch Craft Works. Because of
that, Kagari isn’t a reserved and quiet girl, she’s completely mad
(like everyone else in the setting) and trying poorly to hide it.
Her initial time calling Honoka the “princess” is just the tip of
the weird iceberg. For instance, one school day begins with Honoka
lead to a room where she’s got the wicked witch transfer students
(more on this later) tied to stakes and is nonchalantly suggesting
burning them alive, and a visit to her place involves her quickly and
not as subtly as she thinks hiding tiny dolls made in Honoka’s image.
Kagari may have a cold glare and a stern voice, but she successfully
comes across as lovingly obsessive without really veering into
Yandere territory, sometimes dangerously disconnected from any
concept of normal, fiercely protective, and ultimately hugely and
earnestly sweet and loving. Just because she seems incapable of
smiling doesn’t prevent her character from coming through.
In any case the plot. In Witch Craft
Works, there are two factions of witches: the Workshop, the group to
which Kagari and the other friendly witches belong, and their
enemies, the Tower. The main difference between them seems to
largely be that the Workshop has rules and organization while the
Tower pretty much just does what they want (fighting each other as
well as the Workshop fairly often over the course of the show).
However, the Tower Witches do seem to uniformly covet some secret
power that currently exists inside Honoka, making him a beacon for
bad actors that desire that power for themselves, and now that he’s
been found, his life is going to be anything but normal.
Most of the Tower witches are…
comically inept. Kagari is, at least as far as the start of the show
is concerned, insanely overpowered: she can do absurd amounts of
damage with her flames, and her body seems to be almost entirely
indestructible. Tanpopo (the animal-eared Tower witch from episode
1, whose special magic seems to be animating those robot bunny
soldiers in various sizes and forms) is joined by her team-mates, who
all transfer into Honoka and Kagari’s class (at first) and make
hilariously little effort to disguise how bizarre they all are, but I
think we see more scenes of that lot at their “strategy meetings”
(Karaoke sessions) or being props for physical comedy than presenting
any sort of legitimate threat. Another gang, consisting of a couple
witch girls and their pet llama (which they treat as totally normal)
are even more marginal. Their attacks, however, do move us forward
by convincing Honoka to attempt to learn witchcraft himself.
Honoka learns how to pass unnoticed by
normals while wearing his witch getup and conjure and ride on a broom
with some difficulty. None of that is particularly helpful, though,
when Honoka and Kagari are ambushed by our first threatening Tower
Witch, Chronoire Schwarz VI. She traps them in a Barrier (an idea of
a magical space somewhat removed from the normal world that seems to
be moderately commonplace in Japanese media but pretty much unknown
in the West) and manages to make a successful attack by knowing the
seemingly invincible Kagari’s weakness: she takes any injury Honoka
would suffer. With Kagari injured and bleeding, Chronoire corners
Honoka and offers him a solution, a magical candy that will unseal
his hidden power (allowing him to save Kagari), an act that would
have the side-effect of exposing that power to the world, making
finding Honoka and taking the power easier on Tower Witches and
protecting him harder. Kagari recovers faster than Chronoire had
reckoned and roasts her good (though thanks to the barrier she’s more
amused than anything else), but Honoka keeps the candy.
I’ll be honest, Chronoire might be my
favorite character in this show, just for how fully she embraces both
the hints of a serious world of conflict between factions of Witches
and the generally zany and lighthearted atmosphere of the entire
thing. Unlike Tanpopo’s gang or the other younger Tower Witches,
Chronoire is legitimately a little bit threatening. She displays
intense (and colorful) magical powers, gives Kagari a run for her
money, and seems to be seeing her schemes hurtling forward even if
she loses in the moment. She comes off as still more of a minor
villain, but one who can actually do a bit of heavy lifting rather
than just providing a Team Rocket style failure reel.
On the other hand, she’s tiny and
youthful looking, physically almost utterly non-threatening. She’s
got a distinctive style, complemented by the fact that she’s attended
by a familiar in the form of a bipedal crocodile in a business suit
and top hat with the demeanor of an English butler. She can talk
sinister, but she can also banter with Kazane (Kagari’s mother, head
of the local Workshop and headmistress of the school), an old friend
of hers, like a grade-A troll or play the part of a petulant child
when faced with something she doesn’t like. There’s even an arc
where she’s briefly acting as an authority figure in the school,
covering for Kazane, and proudly strides down a hallway breaking into
a riot of mayhem proud of how lively the kids these days are.
Chronoire fully embraces the madness without losing sight of her
position as a powerful and dangerous… well, frenemy more than
straight-up foe, but you get the idea.
After that attack, and continued
harassment by Tanpopo’s group and the other Tower Witch annoyances,
it’s decided (largely by Kagari, though Honoka doesn’t object) that
Honoka would be safer living with Kagari, much to the chagrin of his
little sister Kasumi. Kasumi is a Workshop Witch with an unhealthy
attachment to her big brother and a penchant for channeling her magic
through her teddy bear familiar, a fact that results in at least one
kaiju-scale battle between Kasumi riding on the head of her
inflated-to-gigantic teddy bear against Tanpopo commanding a
similarly scaled-up tin-rabbit soldier, nearly leveling the city in
the process (though nothing comes of that; more on that later).
However, it turns out that she doesn’t have to worry about Honoka
moving out per say, since Honoka and Kagari are attacked at her home
by a Tower Witch called Medusa. Medusa has a monstrous form and the
dreaded magic to turn people to stone, restricted though it is by
bindings that were placed on her when she was until fairly recently
imprisoned. She’s also the boss of Tanpopo’s team. Medusa’s
restrained eyes and hands, however, don’t stop her from turning
Kagari to stone, a dire situation that causes Honoka to finally
consume the candy Chronoire gave him, unleashing the power within.
That power, it turns out, is an entity:
Evermillion, the White Princess, a supernatural being of seemingly
limitless ability and a teasing, sarcastic nature. Evermillion holds
off Medusa (obliterating the Kagari family mansion in the process,
hence why the leads won’t be staying) while Honoka, at her
instruction, frees Kagari from her stony state with a kiss. On the
forehead, because he’s embarassed, but it’s enough. Kagari defeats
Medusa in round two, burning white hot, and Evermillion recedes to
lurk hidden within Honoka once again… but the first of the seals
that contained her that way is now broken, and with it the rest are
sure to go, an event that may even set Honoka, and Kagari doggedly
with him, against the Workshop as much as the Tower.
And, ultimately, it’s Kagari who ends
up moving in with Honoka and family. These events are, therefore,
still much to Kasumi’s chagrin.
After Medusa, we get a period of more
“goofing off” episodes that see Honoka and Kagari pitted against
Kasumi, the Student Council, Kazane (briefly), and public opinion of
the student body. There’s some serious stuff, like a glimpse into
Kagari’s past that hints at why she might have the connection to
Honoka that she does, and plenty of comedy like Kasumi trying to
kidnap her brother, Medusa and her gang living unsubtley secretly in
the Takamiya household (having, at least for the time, accepted their
beating.) and so on. The zany antics, however, are largely stopped
by the arrival of the final arc and its antagonist, Weekend.
Weekend is, like Chronoire, a Tower
Witch of notable ability. Unlike Chronoire, Weekend actually tries
her best to be taken seriously, forgetting entirely that she’s in
Witch Craft Works. For instance, instead of Chronoire who deals with
surreal aquatic imagery, magic candy, and a crocodile butler, Weekend
uses bombs. Just bombs. Magic bombs, at least some of the time, but
even then there’s not a lot of whimsy and wonder to her methods. She
starts off by blowing up the city, an act that badly drains Kazane’s
power as the Workshop head, letting us learn just what is with status
quo managing to stand in this setting: Workshop witches make pacts
with the towns in which they set up shop, allowing them to use magic
there and, by the strength of the Workshop leader, protecting the
town from any magical mayhem. Kazane, utterly reflexively, pulls any
ordinary human who would be hurt (this time, the whole population)
into a magic space outside of space until they can be returned safely
with the damage repaired, hence why Kazane is so frequently sour
about massive damage, yet nothing seems to come of it. Protecting
everyone at once, though, puts her out of commission, and with her
magic access for the rest of the Workshop witches.
What follows is a high stakes sequence
of events where Weekend threatens hostages and even the people stored
in safety with death to get at Honoka while Honoka and Kagari,
largely ignorant of her demands, make their way to the core of the
city so that Honoka can make a contract and support the Workshop
Witches and turn the magic back on. Weekend manages to get out of
being bested and trapped (thanks to strapping non-magical bombs to
herself to facilitate a breakout) and continues to cause mayhem and
death, ultimately pulling Honoka and Kagari into a confrontation with
her that resuklts in Honoka offering up his life to Evermillion in
order to restore the city and its people, and Kagari taking his place
as the drained and defeated Weekend slinks away.
Kagari’s death here is actually dragged
out, with enough hang time that you could feel like she might not
come back… if this wasn’t Witch Craft Works. However, the Drama is
somewhat lost because as hard as Weekend tries to be a serious,
deadly, Joker-esque villain, she’s still stuck in a show that
absolutely doesn’t support it, and doesn’t really support the threat
of killing off the female lead either. And, sure enough, a little
magic and true love’s kiss (again not on the lips) manages to bring
Kagari around, though there is some implication that her powers may
have permanently changed, particularly through a loss of
invincibility. We even get to see Weekend captured (first by
Chronoire, who wants to eat her, then by Kazane), but the epilogue is
actually pretty quick. However, we have no time left to explore
that.
As you might be able to guess, Witch
Craft Works is at its best when it’s reaching for being crazy and
more fun than not. Weekend, in particular, doesn’t quite fit. The
fight between her and Kagari is actually a really good action
sequence, and it does belong in this show, but the rest of the
darkness and suffering around the Weekend arc… there are enough
breaks, it does sort of work as a whole package, but it still doesn’t
generally go together. Because of this the show is a bit unbalanced,
stumbling awkwardly from a “helpful” Workshop Witch stuffing an
unconcious Honoka full of produce in an effort to cure him to a
life-or-death battle between powerful and skilled magic users. As
much as Tanpopo and friends are the height of nonthreatening, they’re
kind of what’s right for the show. They do try to be legitimate
enemies, even if they can’t quite manage, but they’re always fun to
watch. They’re having fun or suffering in a comedic manner, which is
the kind of energy the show wants to have. And of course Chronoire
and to a lesser extent Medusa show how you scale that up to higher
threat levels without, as Weekend, losing the tone.
On the whole, I do love Witch Craft
Works. I find new things to be amused by every time I watch it,
because there’s just so much going on with both character and visual
humor, as well as a decent amount of heart under it. But… it is
only really worth a B. I can’t let the fact that I personally
massively enjoy the show to cloud my judgment as to its quality.
It’s good, but it’s more amusing than it is great. All the same, I’d
really recommend watching it if having a little zany fun with witches
and a seasoning of action and drama is at all something you might
enjoy.