AWN columnist Andrew Osmond reviews this week’s cinema preview of the series, coming to both Crunchyroll and Netflix in April, reflecting on the rise of TV anime in American theaters and elsewhere.
The upcoming TV anime comedy Witch Watch will debut on streaming services in April, namely on Crunchyroll and Netflix. But this week, the first three parts are being previewed in cinemas in America and Britain, released by GKIDS and Anime Limited respectively. I’m in Britain at the moment and caught a screening at Wimbledon.
In brief, I liked it. Initially, I felt the resistance I often have to this kind of show: a madcap, very broad comedy. But it’s lively, amusing and feels good-hearted. It also finds a workable balance between loose-linked comedy set-pieces – which are all that some other comedy anime are – and the suggestion of an “arc” story.
The situation, as the trailer makes obvious, is a variant of a decades-old anime template - the “magic girlfriend” comedy. It’s what it sounds like. A boy finds himself sharing a house with a magic-powered girl, often with no grown-up supervision, and mayhem ensues. One paradigm in Japan is the Ursusei Yatsura franchise, originally an icon of the 1970s and 1980s, though it was revived in anime a couple of years ago. You’ll find the older version on Crunchyroll, the newer one on HiDive.
However, it’s been pointed out the “magic girlfriend” format owes much to America. Back in the 1960s, two popular TV imports in Japan were the American sitcoms Bewitched (renamed My Wife is a Witch in Japan) and its rival I Dream of Jeannie (renamed Cute Witch Jeannie). They’re credited with inspiring a different strain of anime too – not magical girlfriends but magical girl series, where the focus is on girls transforming and using supernatural powers. The obvious case is Sailor Moon.
In fact, Witch Watch draws on both these related strands, magical girlfriends and magical girls. The title witch – who, as one might guess, is a teen schoolgirl – is called Nico. She’s interested in getting a boyfriend, but she also wants to use her magic powers to benefit normal people if she can. That idea’s a throwback to some of the early, pre-Sailor Moon magic girl shows, such as 1966’s Sally the Witch.
For reasons linked with a MacGuffin-ish prophecy of doom, Nico ends up living together with Morihito, a boy she knew when they were children. Now Morihito is a handsome, upstanding teenager, with apparently nothing to hide… except he’s actually secretly an ogre, with tremendous physical strength.
One of the series’ main jokes is that Nico is highly flirtatious, hardly bothering to hide her attraction to her “grown-up” playmate. Morihito, on the other hand, is steadfastly unfazed by her antics. For example, when Nico walks around in skimpy pajamas, he just admonishes her not to be lazy and get dressed. It’s a refreshing contrast to the hysterically hormonal schoolboys in many anime comedies, who are like Tex Avery’s lust-crazed Wolf without any of the style.
Beyond that, many of Witch Watch’s situations are familiar enough. Nico’s well-meaning magic spells inevitably backfire, while the youngsters must also contend with going to school together – naturally, they’re up in the same class. But the script is good at finding twists past the predictable. In one scene, for example, Nico shows off her powers by flattening herself to the width of paper. Silliness duly ensues, till Nico ends up in a dangerous place, and the series has just enough quasi-logic for it to feel perilous (especially to claustrophobes).
The obvious question is whether any of these virtues “justifies” Witch Watch’s appearance on the big screen. It’s animated by seven-year-old Bibury Animation, which makes another ongoing comedy, The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You. Witch Watch’s presentation isn’t outstanding even by TV standards – this is no Dan Da Dan. However, its fast shot and mood transitions are its energy, extending in one scene to a hyperactive girl who quizzes Nico in a diner, jumping frantically from frame to discontinuous frame. It’s not art, but it works.
I mentioned Dan Da Dan a moment ago; the Science Saru series had cinema screenings last September. In one way, though, Witch Watch’s preview is a blessed improvement on Dan Da Dan’s. Both previews included Japanese “making of” programs, with comments from the cast and creators to complement the animation.
In the case of Dan Da Dan, though, the “making of” program came at the beginning, and lasted about 20 minutes before the anime started. That felt like a rude disservice to an audience that had already sat through adverts and trailers. I was reminded of the horror stories of the luckless cinema audiences who paid for Pixar’s Coco, but who were forced to endure 21 minutes of Olaf’s Frozen Adventure.
My heart sank when the Witch Watch preview also began with a “making of” … but that gave way to the anime proper inside five minutes. The rest of the behind-the-scenes information was kept back to the end as it should be, when we’d been entertained enough to be interested in how the anime was made.
Peak previews?
Beyond Witch Watch’s virtues, though, I’m covering it as it reflects a trend that might be peaking. For Witch Watch is far from the only TV-derived anime film to reach cinemas this spring. Only last Saturday, I was watching a London cinema screening of Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX – Beginning. That was another big-screen preview of a forthcoming anime series - Gundam GQuuuuuuX, without the “Beginning”– and I mentioned it when it opened in Japan in January.
The week before that, I watched a London screening of Attack on Titan: The Last Attack. (On a multiplex “super screen,” no less, which was a great way to see a film about giants trampling the world underfoot.) Whereas the Witch Watch and Gundam previews each showed the start of a story, Last Attack, as its name implies, is a finale, closing a serial that ran nearly 90 TV episodes.
Even more notably, this finale was already available on Crunchyroll and home formats for more than a year. The new cinema edition had cavernous surround sound and a new meta-epilogue but was otherwise almost all the same.
And it wasn’t so many weeks before Titan that I’d seen the cinema preview of Dan Da Dan. And these titles just keep coming. In recent days, it’s been announced Kaiju No 8: Mission Recon will be released in April in both America and the UK. This is largely a compilation of a TV action series (Kaiju No. 8), though reportedly it also includes a “new original episode.”
There’s also the announced release of Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle, which will open in American cinemas on September 12, continuing the story begun in the Demon Slayer TV series. (Which makes it very timely that there’s an “Infinity Castle” joke in Witch Watch’s script, even if it’s referencing Demon Slayer’s source manga from six years ago.)
Demon Slayer, in fact, was a crucial part of this bewildering-seeming cinema trend. In 2020, the Ufotable studio released the first Demon Slayer cinema film, Demon Slayer: Mugen Train. Released into a Covid-stricken world, the film was an astounding success, earning $507 million worldwide. It also became the highest-grossing film of 2020, again worldwide. Nearly $50 million of those takings came from America.
Of course, 2020 was a unique year, with the film having little competition from Hollywood. Still, Mugen Train was truly popular, with (I thought) extraordinarily favorable reviews from mainstream critics with no fannish investment in TV anime. One example is a video review by Mark Kermode, who’s Britain’s most popular film critic today. He was “swept up” in the film’s energy, contrasting it with Studio Ghibli’s limp Earwig and the Witch.
Even more notably, Kermode could enjoy Mugen Train despite the film making no allowance for newcomers. Mugen Train was a continuation of Demon Slayer's first TV season, opening mid-story without so much as a “Previously On…” True, it wasn’t a hard film to pick up on the fly. Much of Mugen Train’s “story” is an extended fight, though it has multiple references to backstories which were only established in the TV series. Still, many reviewers seemed happy to go along with it.
Since Mugen Train, there’ve been a fair few “tie-in” anime released to cinemas, including several which don’t pretend to be self-contained. Apart from the ones I’ve already mentioned, there was the theatrical release for Evangelion 3.0+1.0: Thrice Upon a Time, the end to a 26-year-old franchise. It referenced four previous films, a 1996 TV show, two conflicting continuities and the real-life circumstances of its creator. It was a sci-fi actioner. So was Psycho-Pass: Providence, which also had a cinema release in Britain and America. The film plugged story gaps in a (largely) TV franchise, without troubling to tell newbies who people were or what had gone before.
There’ve also been sports spinoffs, such as Haikyu!! The Dumpster Battle, which continues a four-season volleyball saga, and Blue Lock: Episode Nagi (pictured), which retells a TV soccer show (Blue Lock) through a side character’s eyes. Again, neither film makes allowances for newbies, though Mark Kermode favorably reviewed Episode Nagi too.
Most of these releases were limited to a small number of cinemas and venues. (UK anime fans like me have an advantage over Americans; the UK’s 40 times smaller than the US, so it’s likelier there’ll be a cinema showing one of these films within a manageable distance.) Still, these films comprise a little export niche within cinema exhibition that’s rather remarkable. I would never have envisioned it a few years ago, and I doubt many distributors did either.
The fact these films cater to a niche, fan audience means that they’ve mostly side-stepped the criticisms of blockbuster franchises. If you have any interest in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you’ll have seen the same complaints repeated over and over: that the MCU films have become like homework, that they expect you to have seen too many other things, and they’ve forgotten how to tell self-contained stories.
All that may be true. But the wave of limited anime cinema releases show that those complaints largely fall away when you’re dealing with niche screenings targeted at fans. Some of those fans will go to Attack on Titan: The Final Attack having watched it already on streaming, but they want to see it collectively on a huge screen with big sound. Others may be happy to sample an anime they’ve never seen before and work out what they can as they go. I have a friend who saw The Final Attack without seeing any of the TV series, and he enjoyed it all the same.
Still, even fan tolerance may have limits. When I wrote about the preview of Gundam GQuuuuuuX in Japan, I mentioned that the trailers concealed a “secret” in the film. Namely, that it’s not a self-contained story. Rather, the preview’s first half-hour turned out to be a “what if?” reimagining of the very first Gundam TV serial, shown all the way back in 1979. When I saw the film in Tokyo, that trick had audience members buzzing and they left the cinemas. It’s the kind of twist that many fans love.
And yet this week, when Gundam GQuuuuuuX opened in Britain, I’ve seen multiple fans complaining the marketing didn’t play fair. The point is that most Gundam anime over the last 46 years have been largely or wholly stand-alone. Now there’s an especially well-promoted Gundam that seemed to be a new story… and it turns out to be a stealth “sequel” to a 1979 story that many fans hadn’t seen. Anime fans often see mountains of anime, but many would draw the line at a show made decades before they were born.
So, I would advise anime marketers; be careful with such tricks. They may be meant as benign fanservice, to delight the faithful. But they could also be gifts that frustrate their recipients, making them less likely to come back next time. To make a Hollywood comparison, it’s a bit like the Disney debacle with Olaf’s Frozen Adventure.
