It’s official: per today’s panel at Anime Expo, an anime adaptation of Kamome Shirahama’s Eisner award winning manga series Witch Hat Atelier is set to premiere on Crunchyroll in 2025. The series will be animated by BUG FILMS, the studio behind Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead.
The synopsis of the first volume, per Kodansha Comics, reads:
In a world where everyone takes wonders like magic spells and dragons for granted, Coco is a girl with a simple dream: She wants to be a witch. But everybody knows magicians are born, not made, and Coco was not born with a gift for magic. Resigned to her un-magical life, Coco is about to give up on her dream to become a witch…until the day she meets Qifrey, a mysterious, traveling magician. After secretly seeing Qifrey perform magic in a way she’s never seen before, Coco soon learns what everybody “knows” might not be the truth, and discovers that her magical dream may not be as far away as it may seem…
Feast your eyes on the trailer below:
The series will be directed by the prolific Ayumu Watanabe, whose past work includes the visually stunning Children of the Sea, the television series After the Rain and many Doraemon films. The producer is Hiroaki Kojima, who collaborated with Watanabe at the studio OLM on projects such as Komi Can’t Communicate and Summertime Rendering. Character designs are credited to Kairi Unabara, who contributed to the eighth episode of Pokemon Evolutions. Finally, the music is composed by Yuka Kitamura, who went freelance in 2023 after scoring From Software’s blockbuster videogame Elden Ring.
BUG FILMS is the real wildcard here. The premiere of their debut series Zom 100 last year, directed by Kazuki Kawagoe, was one of the best episodes that aired in 2023. The rest of the series struggled to live up to that promise. (I recommend reading Kevin Cirugeda’s write-up in Sakuga Blog if you’d like to learn more.) Witch Hat Atelier represents a chance for the studio to prove that it’s capable of learning from its past mistakes. It will be a challenging project regardless: Shirahama’s art and paneling is tough to beat.
Witch Hat Atelier is a favorite of the staff here at Comics Beat. Most recently, Ilgın Side Soysal praised the series in an installment of Beat’s Bizarre Adventure. Before that, Yazmin Garcia reviewed the enjoyable spin-off Witch Hat Atelier Kitchen. I think I speak for my colleagues by saying that we’re all rooting for the BUG FILMS crew to make the best version of Witch Hat Atelier they can. Here’s hoping the process goes smoothly!
Witch Hat Atelier is set to premiere on Crunchyroll in 2025. The manga is available in physical and digital editions from Kodansha Comics.
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