It’s a good time to be a fan of fantasy anime. Hot on the heels of highly-popular titles like Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, Delicious in Dungeon and Mashle: Magic and Muscles, the imaginative fiction fever will continue with Witch Hat Atelier, slated to release in 2025.
Revealed in a pre-animated teaser trailer at Anime Expo 2024, the series is set to adapt Kamome Shirahama’s manga of the same name. Bug Films, who previously produced Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead, is handling the animation with Ayumu Watanabe (Ace Attorney, Komi Can’t Communicate) as director. Yuka Kitamura, of Elden Ring fame, is composing the music. Other staff include Hiroaki Kojima as producer and Kairi Unabara as the character designer.
An official visual was also unveiled alongside the announcement. Crunchyroll will stream the anime as it airs, which features the following synopsis:
“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…”
Witch Hat Atelier debuted in 2016 in Kodansha’s Morning Two magazine, totalling 13 tankoubon volumes as of February 2024. It was nominated for various accolades, and won the Harvey Awards for Best Manga in 2020. A spin-off series titled Witch Hat Atelier Kitchen (or Tongari Boushi no Kitchen in Japanese) by Hiromi Sato was launched in 2019.
Si Jia is a casual geek at heart – or as casual as someone with Sephiroth’s theme on her Spotify playlist can get. A fan of movies, games, and Japanese culture, Si Jia’s greatest weakness is the Steam Summer Sale. Or any Steam sale, really.
Natalie
