It is once again spooky season, and this year that’s going to mean one thing: witches!
I love the witch archetype in anime. Terrifying, adorable, or anywhere in between, these magical girls (who may sometimes overlap with Magical Girls) and their usually sizable hats just seem to hit the right notes for a lot of folks, myself included, and we’re here to honor them this month – and we’ll start by putting the “fun” in “fungus” (or so I hope) with Champignon Witch.
We begin in a gorgeously rendered if absurdly scaled fairy tale kingdom
In this land, so the obtrusive narrator is keen to tell us, lives Luna, a young witch (as witches reckon such things) who stays in the forest with her familiars. There, she makes medicine, which she can sell in town in order to buy books, which she loves. Understandable. However, most of the town isn’t very keen on her – not only does she seem to be deadly poisonous, but her mere presence draws in natural “poisons” and spiritual malaise and manifests them into deadly toxic mushrooms that sprout up in her wake or sometimes on things she touches. So, yeah, not very convenient. Add in that the local government tends to kill “black” (not state-sanctioned) witches and frankly I’m not sure the scorn she gets from everyone but the apothecary and half-human bookseller is really unjustified or excessive.
That said, she seems like a very kind person, and also more lonely than she realizes thanks to her life-long isolation. The first two episodes cover what’s sort of a vignette, where Luna falls in love with a boy from town, but they’re forbidden to be together, in person because of her poisonous body, socially because he’s related to white witches who would get witch-hunting upset if they learned, and ultimately even through magical astral projection because it drains the boy’s spirit, forcing Luna to both heal the harm she’d done and take away the feelings and memories her first love had of her.
Cut to undeclared time later where she finds a different pretty boy stabbed and dumped in the river. This is apparently the narrator as well. This is the main plot, as it turns out the boy is bearing such a massive spiritual malaise that when Luna draws it out, even she can’t contain it, forcing her to visit some sort of mushroom god who helps her. Before we can even start treating the kid (who ages down from teen-ish to grade school on decursing) a bunch of powerful black witches show up to put Luna on trial. Eventually, we hear that the boy is – or was – a seed of The End Of All Things, essentially meaning that he would one day become an omnidestructive monster of decay. Luna swears he’s clean now, and evidently has some skin in the game as we’re told she began her life under the same curse.
It takes a lot of doing, but eventually the council agrees to let Luna try to train the kid into becoming a magician rather than the End, with the requirement that she has three years and he’ll have to pass tests and trials in the meantime.
So it’s on to training and bonding our ostensible main characters, right? Actually, no. The ghost of the slain Cat Witch came to speak at Luna’s trial, so we need an entire episode on their backstory together. Turns out, they didn’t start as the dear friends/sisters they ended up as by Cat’s death
The episode isn’t poorly constructed, but in the macro scheme of things it is kind of pointless. We already know post-cat Luna and we know where Cat’s story went from the trial, seeing it in full detail is a bit extra for a twelve episode show.
And this is where you can really start to put together that pacing, especially macro pacing, is a big issue for Champignon Witch. The basic ad copy of the show will potentially tell you about Luna taking in and teaching the cursed kid, like it’s the premise of the show. But this cat flashback is episode 5 and we still don’t know the kid’s name because said kid has not been conscious in the present tense to clue us in.
It’s not all wasted time… but it is a good deal. Take the two episodes with Luna and the first pretty boy she had to break up with. What did we really learn about her? What in those events informed her plot-critical decisions? Not a whole lot. We kind of needed the opening narration and town visit sequence that got us the premise of who Luna was and how she lived her life, but she takes in the kid on the grounds of Cursed Child, her having this past love that ended badly doesn’t exactly figure. Then we have two episodes to pick up the kid and get trialed over him. Obviously, some of that is needed; we need to meet the other witches who are going to be monitoring her progress and guarding the thresholds, and we need to establish a good deal about Luna and the kid. But it’s still a bit overwrought, with more exposition dumps than are strictly necessary and round after round of “oh no the trial we know has to go Luna’s way for the show to happen is so very close” with her main opponent claiming a technicality, then the vote being tied, then dealing with an abstention, then dealing with the cat ghost, and then dealing with the proposal that actually gets accepted, after an unnecessary little bit of fight-and-escape when the Fire Magician (Luna’s harshest critic) gets too eager to immolate somebody only they just go right back to talking without anybody really achieving anything in the scuffed scuffle…
I think you could have gotten a solid opener to this show in two episodes: one that has Luna in town dreaming of more, only to discover this stabbed lost child in the river, take him home, and extract a scary amount of evil ick from him. Then the council can show up, give Luna her trial in an episode with less repetition and “as you know” matters, and then move on from there. Instead, it’s pretty much half the show gone before we even get this kid who is very important to the concept of the show to be a character.
And, let’s be clear, when a show gets to my table for grading, how it was advertised doesn’t matter much: I try to address the “text” of the show rather than its context. Sometimes, like in The Detective Is Already Dead the text doesn’t agree with itself, and that’s a problem; it’s an X written as a Y. But botched releases and poor pitches are water under the bridge, so maybe I could cut Champignon Witch a little slack and say sure, this is Luna’s story and not the Luna + Cursed Kid show (though it will swerve hard the other way), let’s assess it as that, where we can get the opening romance or the Cat Witch flashback because they concern Luna and are independently interesting.
There are a couple problems with that.
First off, the narrator. Sure, we don’t know at first that the narrator is actually a character in the show, telling a story that happened to them some time after the fact – at first it feels like just the set dressing for a very storybook-inspired fantasy. But all the same the narrator, whose voice we hear far more than Luna’s in the opening two episodes, is that character we’re waiting to hear from, and that reinforces the idea that this character is important.
Second, Luna’s emotions. The basic idea of Luna is that she’s this fairly green witch who is very poorly socialized because her mere presence is dangerous to ordinary mortals. Simple and effective. But every time one of these digressions gives Luna more socialization outside of her Familiars, it makes the idea of her bonding with her apprentice a little less magical and important for her. She had this medium-term romantic fling via astral projection in the first two episodes, so we know she understands what love is and is capable of it. We can’t really see her coming out of her shell with her apprentice because she already came out of her shell with pretty boy.
We’re told she lives alone in the forest with her familiars and only really has some distant contacts in town where everybody treats her with scorn, but then episode 5 rolls around and we learn that somewhere before that, she was taken under the wing of the Beast Magician and possibly others and had tea parties with Cat, Bat, and Mouse, none of whom are the sort of backhanded half-friends still scared of her like the apothecary or the bookseller. When she has this web of bonds hiding in her backstory, even if things ended tragically, she doesn’t feel like quite as much of a sad loner as she was meant to be, so it’s not as triumphant when she forms a new bond.
Third, there’s still pacing basics to consider. Stabbed kid is introduced at the very end of episode 2, basically in the stinger even if it is respectfully before the credits. Stabbed kid remains stabbed through episode three. And episode four. And episode five even if it’s not taking place in “the present”. That’s a lot of hang time on “He’s lost a lot of blood, I don’t know what you’ll be able to do for him”. It’s enough that you sort of start to forget that there was this imminent threat, because it gets interrupted by all these other things until I guess it takes care of itself.
I know I’m nowhere near the grading end yet, but I don’t think I’ll surprise any long term readers saying this: Champignon Witch is not as bad as I Want To Escape From Princess Lessons. It’s not even close. But some of its sins are… reminiscent of the sins created by that show being the slop of the shoujo romantic fantasy set. Chief among them that the writers seem afraid to let Luna be too damaged or isolated a character because then the girls watching might feel conflicted about being her, even when coming into the main plot with damage and isolation would actually benefit her in a pretty big way.
It should also be no surprise, especially after that, when I say that this show clearly can’t hold a candle to Witch Hat Atelier. When you think about it, they have fairly similar pitches: a youngster needs to learn magic in order to avoid a tragic fate, and so is taken in by an eccentric teacher despite much of magical society being deeply against the youngster. The PoV is switched, where in Witch Hat we’re mostly following youngster Coco and here we’re mostly following teacher Luna, but there’s at least a deeply related taxonomy there. And Witch Hat works, in part, because its characters are allowed to have real flaws. The writing isn’t afraid to give real grounding to Coco’s self-worth issues. It’s not scared to make Agott legitimately mean, or to really dig into Richeh’s damage. Because of that, those characters feel much more like living and breathing people and are much more engaging to watch than someone like Luna whose edges get sanded away in the name of making her approachable.
Anyway, that kind of got away from me. Cat Witch flashback episode. Yeah, she goes on a rescue mission to the castle of the white witches and gets herself executed in the town square once she and Luna are good friends. At the end of the episode we abruptly return to the present and the kid. Seems like he was a prince (as we were already made aware of) who was given the Rasputin treatment of being poisoned, stabbed, and chucked into a river by agents of the ruling White Witches. He wakes up and is induced to give his name. He has a lot, but goes with the secret magic True Name of Lizel. Sure. At least I can stop calling him “kid”. It gets shortened to the less-magic Lize quickly.
By Haruhi, we’re finally there. And this is when the show changes its pacing from “sedate” to “glacial” as we spend three episodes trying to get Lize past level zero. It would be one thing if there were a lot of problems or we tried a lot of things, but neither of those is really true. At first, a dazed and confused Lize tries to run away when he overhears a good deal of “or death” talk, leading to Luna extracting another, much more manageable mushroom from him. However, it’s pointed out that removing his spiritual malaise that way seems to remove the associated memories and personal growth that go with it, which I guess in a literal sense is why he de-aged when the monster miasma mushroom was removed.
Luna’s solution to this is to have him write down his negative thoughts in a magic diary that… does the exact same thing, but allows Lize himself to notice the memory loss and get a little bent out of shape about it. I guess he can decide what to write down or not, but it’s not really a solution. A Mushroom Lord offshoot offers to hear him out in a more mundane way, which leads to a good deal of puttering and also us getting the idea that maybe if he’s not being constantly overwhelmed by negativity, he won’t need it. We just sort of leave that on the backburner as we segue to the idea that his magic studies are going a bit slow… or a lot slow, if the council has anything to say about it.
After the one magic lesson we see him try, we finally get a bit of a twist to the rules we thought we understood. It seems that Black and White witches are more meaningfully different than their allegiance, and that being descended from them Lize has a White Witch constitution and magic backing, meaning he literally can’t learn effectively the way that Luna did or in any way she can teach. Luckily, his plant affinity leads to gardening which in turn leads to him doing the White Witch thing and becoming aware of the spirits of nature all around him, gaining their blessings through charm in order to power up. Evidently, this would be acceptable, but we’re thrown another new rule that we don’t know how seriously to take: Love is both the power of White Witches and poison to Black Witches.
Call me crazy, but I think in this show so far, Luna experiences quite a bit of love. She had her fling with that pretty boy from town, and in a less romantic sense she had the Cat Witch as a beloved friend. Heck, one of the other characters on scene, who often does the talking because the show chooses to have Luna get lines like her VA is being paid by the word, is a crow familiar of the Bird Witch who can take human(oid) form and who seems to be in love with Luna, getting jealous of the pretty boy or Lize and being very protective of her. Abrasive manner or no, that’s still love, so clearly being the target of affection in some sense is perfectly safe, even if you ignore some of the spoilers narrator-era Lize gave us early.
And, after that’s foreshadowed as important by the narrator we just have another filler episode of Lize being too kind as the spirits would have it and using their blessing to help cursed critters. Okay?
Just when you think this is all just slice of life with a Sword of Damocles, plot does arrive. Darkness falls across the land, and it seems that the End of All Things has appeared in the world. Guess there’s not just one seed at a time. This has made the local area particularly hostile. Luna tries to clear the air, but gets stoned for her trouble.
We actually get a reappearance of that pretty boy she dated, now an enforcer for the White Witches, who lets her go based on gut feelings. While the interactions here do get Luna a little bent out of shape, I’m not sure they justify how long the setup was. The Wind Magician shows up as things get worse, including a doomsayer exploding into poison goo, and gets everybody friendly out of dodge before deciding it’s test time and it would be easier on him to just kill Lize right away.
We spend a lot of time not taking that seriously and having Lize angst over the fact that his memory has more holes than swiss cheese because Luna is still extracting ick from him. The nonsense is eventually interrupted by the arrival of Bird (whose house they’ve crashed at), so they pivot to puttering with him. It turns out pretty boy is now Bird’s double agent, and Lize angsts about assuming things between him and Luna which, while not wrong, are kind of buried. The love poison thing is brought up, and Lize angsts while Wind does his job and interviews the kid.
Wind decides to go easy because I guess he bonds with Lize a little, and everything goes back to status quo. Lize still has memories removed, though possibly fewer than before, and still loves Luna despite believing that it’s something he has to keep to himself to avoid cursing her with reciprocation. I guess. Thus, the show decides to end.
Now, it may sound like I’ve been kind of hard on Champignon Witch. I did read it the riot act here and there, and it does have a lot of problems… but I’ve saved its virtues for the end, I guess.
Champignon Witch has beautiful art and atmosphere that tie together and support each other. Its vision of this world is clear and thematic, and everything about the show supports this; The sound design, the frequent use of narration, even the way we don’t hear Luna talk as much as she clearly does in a canonical sense (to which you already get the sense she’s shy and laconic) does a lot to sell this world of magic and its unique design. I won’t say it’s the best, but that’s because there are some real greats when it comes to evoking fantastic worlds, like Witch Hat or the works of Hayao Miyazaki. It doesn’t have to catch those highs to be good in a particular regard. The pacing, where it feels like we’ve barely scratched the surface of Lize’s story, is just about the only fault that isn’t at least in service to something.
That said, it is a soporific, and that’s rarely a good thing for entertainment. Not quite slice of life but closer than you’d hope, Champignon Witch has an awkward time building interest, and I think if I weren’t reviewing it, I’d have just sort of let it slip away from me somewhere in the middle to be forgotten.
Because of that, it’s going to be riding that deadly line between C and D, based on whether I can recommend it or not. And to that, I think I’ll give the show a C-. Being soporific isn’t usually good, but sometimes you just want media that works like a cup of chamomile tea, and despite the theoretically dramatic or fraught bits of Champignon Witch, I think that’s where it falls. It’s soothing, without being insultingly saccharine… not a great product, but one I could see reaching for in times of particular need.