Witch Hat Atelier Director on the Challenges of Adapting the Manga to Screen

We spoke with the director of Witch Hat Atelier about bringing the manga's story to life.

By Evan Valentine

Witch Hat Atelier will be one of the biggest new anime releases of 2025. Focusing on a heartfelt story that has become a fan-favorite in the manga world, the series is hoping to hit the same heights as thoughtful anime series such as Delicious in Dungeon and Frieren: Beyond Journey's End. Recently, we here at ComicBook had the chance to attend Anime Expo and talk with the director of Witch Hat Atelier's anime adaptation, Ayumu Watanabe, and the challenges that arose in bringing the source material to life for the first time.

Watanabe started the conversation by stating that the dense nature of the manga made animating the series that much more difficult, "There's a dense amount of detailed information within the manga. And under normal circumstances, when adapting something into an anime, such animation means there's going to be movement at the core of its expression. Anime productions will try to reduce the amount of information needed for certain types of expression in order to make the animating process easier and more seamless. But in our case, we're fighting really hard to preserve as much as you possibly can from the manga. Of course, talk is free, so I can say that all day long."

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(Photo: Bug Films)

Witch Hat Atelier's Anime Aspirations

Ayumu further dove into the animation challenges, stating that it would be no easy feat to adapt the source material, "I think getting as close as we can to the underlying original manga is going to be the challenge. That is a constant problem. The challenge is ongoing. Often times, simplifying and abstracting is a key component of the process of adapting a work into an anime. We will take in lines and simplify them and then apply color to create certain aesthetics. But going back to that density I mentioned earlier, the manga gives us a certain richness and an extra dimension so to speak."

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Finally, Witch Hat Atelier's director broke down how Bug Films is employing a brand new animation style for the series, "We're using a technique called hatching which is a very challenging technique. So when it comes to figuring out how to crack Witch Hat Atelier and adapt it into an anime... Is it possible? I'm still not sure yet. We'll find out when it's finally available for everyone to see. And you'll know then if we were able to achieve what we set out to do or not."

If you want to get a head start on Witch Hat Atelier before it hits the small screen, Kodansha has printed the original manga series. Here's how the publisher describes the story of Coco, "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..."  

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