So, this is a show that seemed to be custom tailored just for me. On one side, I love anime witches. Call it a personal appeal but making the robe-and-pointy-hat combo look goodis a plus, along with the usual combo of impressive magic and decent cunning. On the other side, I typically enjoy travelogues, stories that focus on a person’s journey through a number of other engaging scenarios. So, a show about an anime witch going on a journey through a fantasy world encountering a variety of wonders and threats? This should be really good, or at least really appealing.
Of course, looking at things with a critical eye, I can’t just let a show get away on a couple of themes alone; this has to be fairly considered for what it achieves, not just want the pitch is.
For that, we start our journey with young Elaina, a girl who becomes fascinated with a book called the Journey of Nike, about a witch who traveled the world and encountered many wondrous things. Because of this, the little girl becomes enchanted by the idea and grows up with the goal of, like her idol, becoming a witch and going on a great journey.
We pick up with her having completed basic magic training, and thereafter having a need to serve an apprenticeship in order to be acknowledged as a true witch. However, most of the witches of her home area seem to want to snub her, as she embarrassed them by becoming the youngest graduate on record. This proves a problem until the arrival of an eccentric wanderer, a witch named Fran titled the Stardust Witch. Fran agrees to take Elaina on, but gives her quite a hard time, ultimately teaching Elaina very little and then squaring off against her in a magic duel. When Elaina’s conviction remains, though, Fran apologizes for her mistreatment and reveals that Elaina’s parents convinced her both to take Elaina on, and to pressure her so that she wouldn’t launch off without thinking twice. After that, Elaina’s apprenticeship goes quite well, and she ultimately is named a full witch (under the title “Ashen Witch”), and soon after departs on her journey with the blessing of her parents.
One of the earlier places Elaina visits is the Kingdom of Mages, which as one might guess from the title is basically all the good sides of Magnostadt with none of the horrifying truths; a country full of spellcasters, valuing them very highly. Shortly after arrival, a hopeful witch trainee named Saya crashes into her on her broom, and while Elaina is able to fix up the results of the crash, she doesn’t realize until later that she lost the badge that marks her as a witch, resulting in her being treated rather poorly overall. She ultimately finds an inn where Saya works, which is willing to put her up, and while she’s there she’s convinced to tutor Saya in magic. The two seem to become friends, but it turns out Saya is hiding something: she caused the accident intentionally, and actually stole the badge from Elaina. Her motives seem to be sympathetic, though, mostly to do with her own nerves and poor self esteem making her believe that she needed someone to hold her hand through the situation. She gives the badge back when called on it, and seems ready to actually move forward, with a new and even greater appreciation of Elaina (actually, it’s more of a played-for-laughs crush, but who’s counting?). Elaina, for her part, moves on as she is wont to do.
From here, we get a few vignettes which… don’t really add anything to any sort of larger scope plot. Actually, I think these episodes are some of the best ones in the show, but there’s something odd about them: they tend to go dark, much darker than you would have thought from the first two episodes of the show.
The first story sees Elaina encounter a girl in a field of flowers, who gives her a bouquet to carry onward. At the next town over, one of the guards recognizes the description of the girl as being his missing sister, while another panics over the flowers, revealing that while they have no effect on magic-users, they’re actually supernatural in nature. He takes the flowers to burn them, but the brother-guard still seems badly shaken and Elaina decides to check up on things. She checks on the flower field and finds the girl has been entirely overgrown, turned into a plant monster version of herself. The brother is there too, giving himself over to the plants to be transformed into a cursed being. Disturbed and with nothing to do, Elaina moves on, but the last shot lets the audience know that a small army of the taken are emerging from the flower fields, shambling towards town with bouquets in hand. Horrifying.
After that apocalyptic scenario is left in Elaina’s rear view mirror (not that brooms have rear-view mirrors), we see her come across a young man who is using his petty magic to collect and bottle up happiness for the girl he likes. Elaina accepts his invitation to visit his home, and she finds that while he seems well-intentioned, the girl is actually a badly abused slave owned by the boy’s bastard father. She holds her tongue as much as she can, and also recalls a story she heard about a man doing something similar for his bedridden wife, showing her scenes of the wonders of the outside world. Before she leaves, the young man gives/shows the bottled happiness to the slave girl, bringing her to tears. Elaina moves on, but recalls for herself that the older story didn’t have a happy ending, and the woman committed suicide because she became lost in grief over having seen what she could never truly have. Elaina spares a thought to hope that this time things will be different, but the audience is given no reason to think it will. Well, that’s depressing.
The next one up, and the last for now, sees Elaina come to a ruined, depopulated kingdom. When she reaches the castle, though, she finds the sole living citizen: the princess of the nation, who has amnesia. She reveals that the kingdom is ruined because of a terrible monster that comes out at night, and sure enough Elaina is able to witness as much. The princess requests Elaina’s help fighting the monster, assuring Elaina that she’ll only have to help with set up while the princess, who is also a witch, will actually fight the beast. This is what happens and in the process, the princess recovers both her memories and a cruel and insane side to her personality. The truth comes out that the monster was none other than her father, the king, transformed by the Princess’s own magic as revenge for ordering the execution of her lover, who was a lowly cook. Elaina leaves as the princess spirals deeper into madness, having breakfast with imaginary versions of her dead lover and child. That’s depressing and kind of horrifying.
After that, we get another couple of ‘plot’ episodes. In the first, Elaina encounters Fran once again, finding that she’s taken up a more traditional teaching post. The episode is, on the whole, very light, essentially a bit of fluff to let us know that Fran is still in this and relevant. The second has a little more meat to it – Elaina arrives at the Land of Truth Tellers, finding that the country is currently miserable and silent because of great magic done that forbids anyone from speaking a lie of any kind, even down to the basic pleasantries that keep society going. There she encounters both a local witch (the one who cast the spell because the king, who she has a crush on, requested it. It cost her her voice, her magic power, and because of that her place at court) and the witch that said local hired to try to fix the situation: Saya! Saya and Elaina work together (despite Saya’s obsession), ultimately destroying the artifact that was the focus for the spell, ending its reign of annoying terror and restoring what the local witch lost. This mostly serves to catch us up with Saya, now a full witch as well and one working for a sort of magic mercenary association at that, but also serves as a visit to some wacky place we’ll never be back to as well.
The show then switches gears back to irrelevant but mildly interesting vignettes. In one, Elaina visits a town that was described in the Journey of Nike. In Nike’s visit (which is done with enough detail that we see Nike apparently bore an eerie resemblance to Elaina), she found a town divided by a great wall, built out of animosity, and convinces both sides, out of a sense of competition with the other side they never see, to have travelers carve the praises of the land into the wall. When Elaina arrives, though, the wall has been freshly torn down – it turns out that the advice of another witch – Saya, not that Elaina ever learns that – regarding failing tourism sees natives start to carve words into the wall, like Nike appealing to both sides saying the other had already agreed, and starting off with hacking her own lust for Elaina into the wall. With the natives carving come mistakes, regrets, scratching out, and ultimately a breach in the wall, after which they decide that they don’t hate the other side so much, and can get along with the darn thing torn down. Much to Elaina’s chagrin, she doesn’t even find out which side had more praises carved into it before the end.
In the other, we get a flashback from some town locals about how a local festival started: Elaina arrived with the village, whose trade was in wine, divided against itself due to the unnatural success of one winery that used a poster girl to stomp the grapes and put her likeness on the bottle to sell it. The head of another winery thinks Elaina will make a fine poster girl and has her take a turn and a picture (not that it turns out well) before it’s revealed that the poster girl didn’t do the grape-stomping at all, causing a ruckus over false advertising that broke into a grapes-only food fight thanks to a drunken Elaina. By the time the mess was cleaned up and Elaina gone, bruised egos weren’t bruised any longer, and thus the grape-throwing festival began.
From there, we step back to what passes for plot in this show with Elaina’s arrival in a town that’s full of dolls everywhere and, apparently, stalked by a criminal known as the Ripper. She meets the witch on the case of the Ripper, named Sheila, and then gets really involved in the case when she becomes a victim: the Ripper, it seems, steals women’s hair, cutting it short and claiming the lost length for some nefarious purpose. Elaina’s pursuit of her hair leads her to work together with Sheila to crack the Ripper case, eventually bringing them to an underground doll auction.
At the auction, they notice the doll made with Elaina’s hair and arrest the seller, the owner of a doll shop that Elaina visited earlier. At the end of the scenario, Elaina is able to magic her hair back in place, and the audience learns that Sheila is currently Saya’s mentor.
But enough of that, you want to see more of the dark stuff, right? Elaina comes across a witch who needs her help for a spell to go back in time, since she doesn’t have the magical power to fuel it herself. Elaina agrees (the payment being rather nice and Elaina being at least a little short on coin) and they proceed. Why does she want to go back in time, though, and what will it change? Well, the answer to the latter question is nothing: they’ll create a new timeline, but return to their own. That makes the why only more important. The local witch, it seems, had a friend when she was a child, who was very dear to her. Said friends parents were murdered, which ended up setting the friend down a path where she eventually became a deranged serial killer, who the witch was forced to kill for justice reasons. She wants to go back and change those events so she can, at least in spirit, save her friend and rest knowing there is some world where she was able to live a happy life.
However, while in the past they’re able to change events and keep the friend’s parents from a date with death, it turns out all is not well… because it was the little girl who killed her own parents in the first place. She shows her true colors, already being broken and insane thanks to years of abuse, rebukes and stabs the future version of her friend, and even makes a fair try at Elaina until the friendly witch pulls together enough strength to do exactly what she did before: execute someone she thought was a friend, via the viscerally brutal method of using magic to choke her until the pressure of the spell tightening around her neck rips her head off. Except this time, it’s a child rather than an adult. The spell’s window ends and Elaina and her acquaintance are returned to the present, where Elaina realizes that the other witch used her memories of her friend, which had been precious enough to attempt this insane stunt, as fuel for her magic. The whole scenario leaves Elaina disturbed both by the brutal violence she witnessed and the loss, and the episode is full of dark shadows and tortured emotions, even more than the previous dark scenarios.
Well, enough of that, let’s move on to plot! We get an episode that’s largely focused on flashback. Sheila sends Saya to run a package to a certain city, then meets up with Fran. Here we get that the two of them were once apprentices to none other than Nike (Strongly implied, I feel, to be Elaina’s mother, hence why said mother was able to contact Fran at the beginning). During a visit to that same city, they ran into a band of thugs called the Curio Company who were using magic items to cause trouble, especially for proper magic-users. Fran and Sheila managed to help get the Curio Company defeated and arrested, which also caused them to get over their initial animosity and become friends. However, this past may be more relevant than ever as Sheila realizes that the box she sent with Saya is connected to the Curio Company, causing her to race off to follow Saya.
In the present (and a new episode) Elaina appears in the town in question. As she and Saya are looking around, Saya encounters members of the Curio Company (out of prison after many years and back for revenge) who try to get her to open the box, but fail. However, the leader tags Saya with something, and then goes about her business, encountering Elaina. Seeing that Elaina appears to be a vain fool, the Curio Company leader tags her with the same thing, causing her to switch minds with Saya. And Elaina, far more curious than cautious, opens the box before she even realizes anything is wrong.
This afflicts the whole town with a love potion fog, which the Curio Company (protected) uses to start robbing people blind. Saya and Elaina find each other (with the help of Saya’s sister, who is in town as a witch secret agent) and team up to take on the Curio Company. They apprehend the leader, and Fran and Sheila appear having dealt with other cells and most of the mess outside. By the next day, the body swap is over, and all’s well that ends well, Elaina ready to continue her journey having relived one of the stories in the Journey of Nike (not realizing how totally she did so, since Fran and Sheila were given different names in the book).
Wait… there’s one more episode. That… kind of seemed like the kind of story the show would go out on. What more do you have to tell?
As it turns out, the last episode sees Elaina visit a country where, supposedly, wishes come true. There she finds a landscape culled from places she visited. There she also meets Elaina, Elaina, and more Elainas. She encounters a whole host of alternate versions of herself with various over-the-top versions of her personality or physical differences, who had more or less different journeys. They’re all concerned because there’s another, violent Elaina as well, who has been hunting her other selves. Elaina Prime eventually encounters Violent Elaina, and teases apart that she’s trying vainly to share the suffering she encountered and wasn’t able to overcome, as the others also share their unique points of view. All the Elainas are gathered together, and compare their journals, with Prime planning now to compile her own “adventures of” book. She moves on, leaving her other selves and the mysterious wish-granting land behind, bumps into a secondary character who’s outright stated to be relevant in the future, and there the show does end.
Because of the structure of Wandering Witch, I decided to leave discussion to the end, and here we are. First, the good: The scenarios are colorful and creative the way you want a fantasy travelogue to be. That’s probably the best element overall; the various one-town kingdoms with their wacky gimmicks are very reminiscent of lots of old stories.
On the odd, there’s Elaina herself. Usually the lead characters in shows like this are more quiet, understated characters. They can be good and deep, but they are trying to not distract from all the weird and wonderful stuff that’s on display. Elaina is… not that. At all. She’s a loud, colorful character who has a very distinctive voice. Actually, there’s a sense in which she’s kind of terrible, in a really fun to watch way. Elaina is, in the end, more of a good person than not, but she is fairly ruled by her vices in a lot of ways as well. She’s preening, arrogant, and extremely vain and self-absorbed at times. She also is more mercenary than would often be the case, rarely offering to help people just out of the goodness of her heart: she’s here to have fun on her journey, and sometimes needs money to keep on going. At other times, when the going gets tough, if she hasn’t been induced to stick around she’s more than willing to just take us to the next episode and leave things in a bad way.
Because of this, you get more the sense of being a tourist in this than being a traveling anything else, since Elaina doesn’t really engage with the world much compared to most other circumstances. I suppose that’s rather fitting, since a tourist is exactly what Elaina is, but it means that there’s not quite so much investment in many of the circumstances. The princess in her castle, the witch who wanted to to back in time for her friend, the army of plant zombies… all these scenarios are ones in which Elaina isn’t really invested, so there’s a degree to which we as the audience, following Elaina, are not invested either.
It’s an interesting situation that I feel smooths the show more than anything. It brings down the peaks, as it were, but it also fills in the valleys. By numbing the show somewhat, the creators are more free to experiment with some scenarios that would be hard to watch or follow, and don’t have to give everything satisfying endings. We don’t have to follow up on the town once divided by a wall or the slave girl offered bottled happiness. This isn’t their story.
All the same, there’s a degree to which I think the show plays it too safe. Yeah, a lot of the individual scenarios are interesting and engaging, but they don’t really establish an identity or a theme between them. In a show like Mushi-shi, there’s a commonality between all the different cases, so even if a lot of them are weird and unique and the tone runs a pretty wide band between lighter and darker scenarios, you feel like everything is connected. Here, I guess a lot of the situations are based around witches and magic-users, but there are the little stories where we’re clearly supposed to find this to be a more lived-in world, and the ones that are more grand and operatic and run primarily on storytelling logic instead. I think the two dark full-episode stories are an example of the dissonance in place: The story of a princess, betrayed by her family, bringing slaughter and ruin to her entire kingdom by turning her father into a kaiju, is a good story. The story about a witch trying to save an alternate version of her dear friend only to discover that said friend wasn’t the good little girl she believed her to be, is also a good story. But even for a travelogue they don’t really belong in the same narrative, since they’re reliant on a very different sort of background.
This isn’t a fatal flaw, though. As I said, they’re both good stories, and even if they don’t belong together, Elaina’s touristy ways do help bridge the gap. It’s easy to see her getting involved with both affairs of state and the little people she encounters… it’s just not quite as easy to feel it.
All in all, Wandering Witch is worth a bog-standard B. It’s a nothing-special show, but it’s fully competent and fully watchable. It’s a B, and not a C, because it’s at the good end of all of that. How are the characters? They’re nice but not amazing. How are the stories? They don’t really stand out but they’re good. How’s the world? It makes a good backdrop, but doesn’t really excel at anything. If you want to see a cute witch encounter loads of different fantasy scenarios, it’s good enough for that. Other than the randomly really dark scenarios that crop up from time to time, you could basically judge the whole show by its title and poster. Which are good, and promising… but not great or distinctive.