Agott does not put her best foot forward. Coco, on the other hand…
Well, let’s get to where we left off: the apprentices were to be left alone for a little while while Qifrey runs an important errand. Agott wastes little time acting on her hostility against Coco. We pretty much open with Agott pushing Coco, first verbally and then literally, into an important test for witch apprentices that can only be taken once and would theoretically forever disqualify Coco if she failed.
This test is to go (via the portal window) to a place called the Dadah range and acquire a specific flower that grows high up the mountains. Only three “contraptions” (spell-scribed items) allowed. The rub is that these mountains aren’t normal.
One of the truths about Witch Hat Atelier is that it infuses magic and the supernatural into its world in a delightful and creative way. Many of these elements are the work of witches, or abuses of magic created in the days before the witch conspiracy took other. Other seem to be just natural here. There’s a background of whimsy and wonder that’s often lacking in cookie-cutter fantasies, and it really helps connect the audience with Coco’s own frequent sense of wonder, making the environments something that does a lot of work to elevate Witch Hat Atelier.
In this particular case, the Dadah range consists of spheres of stone that seem to emerge from the land and float in the sky. And as a conversation between Qifrey and a fellow witch while he’s on his errand tells, at this time of year the mountains extend to their highest altitude, making taking their test right now much more dangerous, potentially even deadly, than it normally would be.
Despite not knowing this before getting shoved into the zone, Coco does at least have the wits about her for one advantage. Agott arms her with a compass that will point her way to the goal and a dish that condenses water from the air for drinking (the latter being a contraption we’d already seen). But, knowing she can have three contraptions, Coco asks to borrow Agott’s flying shows, something Agott allows in part because she thinks that even that won’t help Coco.
Coco does do a lot of fumbling at first. It takes her quite a while to get used to the shoes, and even when she’s started to manage, she’s still not the best at flight. Ultimately, while trying to recover from some poor aerial decisions, she gets startled by what will be our mascot critter for the show, a little white wormy thing called a Brushbuddy. It’s sort of an adorable cross between a cat and a caterpillar.
The startling causes Coco to crash into water, and unfortunately the experience ends up getting the flying shoes smudged to unusable status. Guess magic ink is water soluble and rubs right off with the mud. Seems like a bit of a design flaw many other contraptions don’t seem to suffer from, but I’d assume Agott hadn’t quite finalized anything.
After a very necessary despairing moment, Coco realizes she might have the tools to continue by her own wits. Her supplies were ruined, but the bag is still soaked with magic ink, and while she’s not good with a pen, tailoring with mom taught her to draw lines, curves, and marks with a slightly different tool. Thus, using a pointy stone around which a portion of ink-soaked bag is secured, she’s able to construct a magic seal on the fabric of her cloak. Securing it to a makeshift mast on a boat she found, Coco prepares a seal using everything she’s learned, including a deliberate off-centering to create thrust with her air magic. Brushbuddy comes along for the ride.
Well, the boat doesn’t hold, but the mast becomes a fairly effective glider to which Coco holds on tight, allowing her to take flyby runs of the target, ultimately grasping a single bloom to pass her test.
Before she makes it all the way back, Qifrey returns and prepares to rush off to save her from potential doom, only to encounter Coco and find it’s unnecessary. Agott is deeply displeased that Coco has managed to escape her assassination attempt but seems to get away with having forced Coco into it, and Qifrey makes it clear that Coco is welcome as his apprentice test or no, revealing that his errand was to pick up her cloak and titular hat, the sign that she’s a true witch.
I’m pretty sure now, without getting my volumes off the shelf, that there are grace notes being sacrificed on the altar of pacing. And I’ve often aluded to as much, but I do think that’s a correct choice. When you adapt a work, things have to change. Manga to anime may allow some extremely direct and faithful adaptations, much more than book to film or such, but different forms of media are different, they have impact on their audiences in different ways and a different suite of tools to pull from. Using the tools of the new medium well to express the core of the original source material is more important than precise replication of the source material.
I tend to prefer accurate adaptations of good things to loose ones, and it’s easy to pull up and cite various takes in the canon of media that have been too loose to their detriment, but at the end of it all the adaptation has to stand on its own, and at this point I think that’s something that the anime of Witch Hat Atelier is clearly capable of doing. The Dadah Mountains are one of the first objectively spectacular sights that the manga affords, and their realization in full motion means I’m looking forward to the others.