Often times, I try to highlight things that are sight unseen for me, especially original properties, with my seasonal selection entries. This time, I’ll be doing something a little different: the manga of Witch Hat Atelier is pretty well known to me, so I’ve been ready for this anime for a while.
And I’ll just be frank right away, the material deserves to be a masterpiece.
So, summary first: we meet Coco, the daughter of a tailor. Some time ago, she became enchanted with the possibilities of magic at a festival, where a shady witch sold her a “magic picture book” and “wand”. However, her dreams of becoming a witch seem to be over before they’ve begun thanks to the fact that, well, she wasn’t born a witch so that’s kind of a disqualification.
However, one busy day at the workshop, a witch drops in, revealing himself as such when the magic pegasus carriage of some rich folk who also dropped in breaks. The witch, Qifrey, makes with the fixing, but needs a private space to do the magic. Coco is initially instructed to play lookout so no one peeks, but chasing off some of her local friends means ending up in the perfect position to peek. Against her better judgment, she does, and she sees the truth – that magic isn’t cast as much as it is drawn with ink and pen.
That night, Coco busts out the picture book and “wand” again, revealing the wand to be a pen with an attached inkwell, and finding patterns in the book that resemble what Qifrey was drawing. Sure enough, even if crudely, they work, and Coco begins invoking little spells from a small supply of paper, noodling out some of the rules. Noting that bigger and neater are both better, she opts to start tracing a particularly intricate design from the book.
At about this time, Qifrey gets a bad feeling about how Coco talked about a picture book, which leads to him returning just in time to pull her away when that extremely intricate spell starts to run wild, spreading crystals everywhere. The entire house is engulfed, including Coco’s mother being petrified right before her eyes.
A horrified Coco is told that she’ll have to have her memories erased, but as she begs and pleads for any way to save her mom, Qifrey realizes that wiping her mind per standard procedure would destroy the one lead he has on the renegade figures responsible for putting such dangerous magic in a child’s hands. Thus, he offers Coco an alternative: if she can’t have the secret of magic’s nature erased from her mind, she’ll have to become one of the people who keeps that secret. That is to say, a witch.
And with that monkey’s paw wish for Coco complete, we have episode 1 and our core setup.
In episode 2, we arrive at Qifrey’s Atelier, where Coco is to be integrated with his other apprentices. News travels faster than flying carriages, so they already have an inkling of what’s going on with her. The first two apprentices we meet are the energetic and cheerful Tetia and the lazy and laconic Richeh. They begin Coco’s instruction on the world of magic, as does Qifrey himself.
Qifrey explains the history of magic (mostly how it used to be common knowledge but witches banded together and created the current conspiracy because it was being massively misused to horrifying ends) and also shows Coco a goal in the form of a secret witch library where every book regarding magic is copied in the moment of its making, which would include Coco’s picture book and thus provide a clue on how her mother could be restored (among other possibilities).
Finally, we meet the third apprentice, Coco’s new roommate, Agott. Agott is aloof, but also clearly driven and talented, and she doesn’t seem to think much of Coco. She doesn’t seem to get mad easily either, but either way she’s a somewhat intimidating senior to have, which seems to come due when Qifrey needs to check in with his superiors and leaves Agott in charge of Coco for the following days. Exactly what Agott is going to do with that is left for the next episode ahead.
I have to give credit to the studio here. The manga is gorgeous, and also distinctly stylized, and the animation does a lot of work to bring Witch Hat Atelier to life not as a standard modern animation, but with its own memorable look and feel. The linework, especially, is very reminiscent of the original while still taking advantage of being in full color and motion to add to the production. Long shots may be almost entirely faithfully recreated, while close-ups, even extreme close-ups, are added in an organic fashion to support visual storytelling with an element of time that’s absent in print media.
The story, likewise, is extremely faithful in these first two episodes, I think recreating it moment by moment though I’d have to get my volume 1 off the shelf to be entirely sure how precise it was. That said, if there was imprecision, the flow was organic enough that it was probably better for the new medium.
There’s a lot of both hope and trepidation when it comes to something like Witch Hat Atelier, where the source material is so good and you know what’s possible in taking something that’s already gorgeous and skilled and giving it life and color. The hope is obvious, but the trepidation also can’t be denied because you always fear that somewhere along the line, somebody is going to screw up, and that any misstep could really drag down something that started off flying so high.
So far, I trust it, but we’ll follow along week by week to see how Coco’s journey continues.