The Winter 2024 Anime Preview Guide

The Witch and the Beast

Ashaf: a soft-spoken man with delicate features, a coffin strapped to his back, and an entourage of black crows. Guideau: a feral, violent girl with long fangs and the eyes of a beast. This ominous pair appears one day in a town in thrall to a witch — a ruler with magic coursing through her tattooed body, who has convinced the townsfolk she's their hero. But Ashaf and Guideau know better. They live by one creed: "Wherever a witch goes, only curses and disasters follow." They have scores to settle, and they won't hesitate to remove anyone in their way, be it an angry mob or an army garrison.

The Witch and the Beast is based on a manga of the same name by Kōsuke Satake. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

I admit, I am a sucker for modern fantasy—series that explore ideas like what if witches and monsters existed in our world today? I like them even more when, as we see in The Witch and the Beast, the supernatural is out in the open and not part of some secret underground society. In this episode, we see a witch who has become a superhero—a person who has overcome the stigma of a “witch” and now protects the people from supernatural threats.

Then we get to our main characters, Ashaf and Guideau. In most other anime, they would be the overzealous pair from a group that thinks they're the good guys but are prejudiced assholes. They even play into the character stereotypes with one being polite yet dismissive and the other itching for a fight and wearing her hatred on her sleeve. We also get a person who would normally be the heroine of the story calling them out on their BS. Of course, then said heroine ends up in a pool of blood with her hands and feet chopped off while being sacrificed in a dark magic ritual—so it's safe to say there's a bit of a twisting of tropes going on here.

But while I'd like to continue to gush about what I enjoyed in this one, it's got some rather glaring issues—well, one issue really that cascades into other ones. This show is filled with awkward jump cuts—especially in the action scenes. It's a well-known budget-saving tactic: you show the lead-up to the attack and the result of the attack—but skip the much more complex-to-animate attack itself. Knowing that doesn't make things feel any less disjointed, however.

This isn't just done in the fight scenes, however. The most confusing of these jump cuts comes after the big climatic fight is over. In the fight, Guideau kisses the witch and Guideau's “real body” comes out of Ashaf's coffin. However, the young woman's body is left where it is for the rest of the fight. Then when the battle is over, we see Ashaf carrying the young woman's body as Guideau's real body collapses in the same frame. Yet, with a sudden jump cut to a wide shot, we see no sign of Ashaf's true body.

This left me so confused. Where did Guideau's real body go? Did it go back into the coffin? Did it merge with the young woman's body? And speaking of which, what is the young woman's body in the first place? Is it a corpse Guideau is possessing? Is it a person Guideau has taken over? Is it Guideau's real body just transformed into that form (and if so, how could Guideau have two bodies)?

Actually showing what happened to Guideau's real body in that scene would make things so much clearer but no. Jump cut to a wide shot with the real body missing. Jump cut to Ashaf and Guideau overlooking the city with Guideau once again in female form.

All in all, while the story is my jam, this episode makes me want to go read the manga more than carry on watching the anime. I have a feeling that without the budget-saving directing, the story will be less needlessly confusing.

My pedantic brain is very, very torn on two specific aspects of this premiere. The first is using the word "striga," which is shown on the screen at the beginning. While it can mean "witch" in Latin (one of several words that we might translate that way), it's also a Polish folkloric beast, a woman cursed (possibly by a witch) to become an inhuman monster with a burning hatred of humanity. On the one hand, there's an actual argument to be made that both meanings appear in this episode, with Ione and Guideau each representing one. On the other hand, it annoys me that they're mixing mythologies like this while also throwing in a Greek name (Ione, meaning violet flower). And that leads me to the second detail I got too hung up on, which is that "mage" and "witch" are being used to mean two different things, with the former being more on the side of good (or maybe "good") and the latter evil. Essentially, this is an issue because of the historical gendered implications, with magi being male and witches female – not necessarily true in all areas of history, but the associations have come down that way. This may be something that the show is prepared to address, given that Guideau has both male and female forms, and that could turn out to be an interesting aspect of the story.

That assumes this episode hooks you enough to keep going, and I think there's a decent chance of that. For all of its more cliché elements, it's clear that a lot of thought went into creating the series' world, no matter how awkward some of the juxtapositions look right now. There's a mid-century steampunk aesthetic to the place that I really like, with intricate wrought iron and stained glass alongside cobblestone streets and trolleys, as if time continues to progress, but the setting is somehow static. The idea that witches in the specific city we open in are more favorably viewed than in other places is hinted at, and that does work with Ione's stated purpose of seeking revenge for a wronged witch in her family tree. She accuses Guideau and Ashaf of prejudice when she's operating under something similar in looking to punish an entire city of non-magical people for a crime two generations old, a city that has welcomed her, no less.

I'm not sold that this theme will be treated well. This episode feels like style over substance, with characters talking deeper than their actions indicate. Guideau's rage gets old quickly, and I feel like Marie's situation is glossed over to ensure that this adaptation covers a specific number of original manga pages. But it still has potential as a dark action series, and it sticks close enough to the source material that if you liked that, this stands to make you pretty happy.

This is one of those premieres frustratingly close to being great, but something in the execution leaves it hanging. The elements are all here for an entertaining, dark fantasy story – cool magic, a vaguely steampunk aesthetic, ridiculously hot leads, and some solid action animation – but something was lost while putting those pieces together. The result is a show with obvious potential and a premiere that trips up just enough to leave that potential in peril.

A big part of that is the editing. While there are some decent cuts of animation, and the action is generally nice to look at, there are also some easy-to-see cut corners. Or, well, you actually can't see them because they purposefully edit around certain harder-to-animate moments. A character will wave their hand, magic effects will fly across the screen, and the sound effects will clue us in that something's happening offscreen – then BAM, another character's been trapped in a tree or skewered on conjured spikes. Everything on screen looks good, but the apparent holes and cuts make it difficult to parse the sequence of events between Shot A and Shot B. Conceptually, it's not enough to ruin what is a neat fight, but it drains a lot of the energy.

The characters are in a similar place. Both Guideau and Ashaf look plenty cool, and their personalities have the potential to be a lot of fun as gruff allies in their hunt for the Witch that cursed Guideau. The problem is, there's so much exposition packed into this intro that they don't really get to build beyond "brash angry girl" and "mysterious dude who knows more than he lets on." I'm also unsure what to make of the episode's moral, in which the betrayed apprentice of the episode's Witch of the Week decides you can't judge people by their appearance. Because, like, she didn't ever do that? She judged Ione on her actions, where the Witch apparently spent a long time performing heroics and helping people to earn the entire city's total trust. That's not judging people by their appearances! It's such an odd note to leave what is otherwise a pretty cynical story filled with betrayal and mindless vengeance, and it left me wondering what the story thought its own message was.

That said, having interesting parts is enough to carry through in a season that's looking as weak as this one. Plus, where else will I get cool-looking characters with piercings and (magic) tattoos in anime right now? So sure, we'll see what this one has to offer now that the intro is out of the way.

For a good long stretch of the first episode of The Witch and the Beast, I wasn't quite sure how to feel about the show. Like the recent premiere of Metallic Rouge, which I loved, it's one of those fantasy-action mysteries that picks up in medias res and lets the audience figure things out while its heroes go about one of their usual missions—in this case, we watch as Ashaf the Coffin Guy and Guideau the Razor-Toothed Gremlin Girl go about their investigation of Ione, one of the world's many Witches, who has purportedly bucked the trend of being a ludicrously evil psychopath and taken up work as a hero of the people. Ashaf and Guideau are skeptical, of course; thus, we have the hook for the series.

On paper, I should have been all over this premiere from minute one, but something kept me held back at arm's length. Maybe the somewhat flat artwork and muted color palette failed to give much life to this magical setting. Maybe it was the rushed and fairly predictable nature of the investigation itself, which goes in the exact direction you'd predict it would, at least so far as the Witch Ione herself is concerned. Either way, I liked the episode okay but did not love it, which was disappointing, considering how much I dug the show's promotional material.

Then, in the final act of the episode, we see a brutally impaled Guideau emerge from her partner's giant coffin as a hulking beast that wrecks the ever-loving shit out of Ione, and I found myself thinking, "Oh, wait, this is pretty awesome." It's a kind of stupid, B-movie level of awesomeness that forces you to adjust your expectations on the fly to keep up with it, but that's perfectly fine by me. I don't know if The Witch and the Beast will have the depth of character and narrative to hold up as one of the season's major events. Still, it sure looks like it'll make for a fun time, so long as it can keep providing cool battles for Guideau to fight and neat new settings to get destroyed in the process. I wouldn't mind if it honed its writing chops and found some more interesting stories to tell, besides, but we'll just have to see if The Witch and the Beast can get there by the time the season comes to a close.