Columnist Andrew Osmond checks out the new TV series ‘Journal With Witch,’ ‘You and I Are Polar Opposites,’ and ‘Wash It All Away’ and wonders if they might be endangered in the age of ‘Demon Slayer.’
This week I’ll look at three shows in the current TV anime season. Despite their differences, they have a couple of things in common. For one, they’re not continuing ongoing franchises. For another, few viewers would call them spectacular.
As it happens, the new TV anime season, which started in January, includes several franchise continuations, and some of them are very much spectacles. They include the new season of Jujutsu Kaisen (Season 3), animated by MAPPA, and Trigun Stargaze, the sequel to 2023’s Trigun Stampede, which is animated by the CG studio Orange. Their trailers give a fair idea of what their visuals can rise to. (The trailers also have spoilers if you’re not up to date with the respective franchises.)
Other returning series in the new season include Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, Hell’s Paradise (both on their second seasons), Oshi no Ko (on its third), Fire Force (on what’s being called “Season 3 Part 2” after Part 1 ended last June) and Golden Kamuy (on its fifth and last season).
Not all those shows are spectacle dependent. For instance, Frieren, Oshi no Ko and Golden Kamuy are all character dramas with action, rather than action shows. Nonetheless, it makes you wonder.
A shift to spectacle?
As I highlighted recently, 2025 saw two anime franchise actioners, Demon Slayer and Chainsaw Man, rise to prominence in cinemas worldwide. Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle made America’s top 20 films and the world’s top 10.
Globally, could the audience expectations of anime be shifting towards these kinds of titles, and the expectations of investors too? It’s a question lent pertinence by the big industry news last month. On January 20, it was announced that Netflix entered a “strategic partnership” with MAPPA. MAPPA is one of the leading anime studios, especially linked with franchise fare. Jujutsu Kaisen and Chainsaw Man are its shows, as is the currently-screening Hell’s Paradise. It’s also known for taking over big franchises started by other studios, as with Attack on Titan and the Viking series Vinland Saga.
In the January announcement, Manabu Otsuka, MAPPA’s President and CEO, spoke of “understanding global audience needs” as his studio partners with Netflix. It’s revived an old fan fear, that anime could be globalized at the cost of its Japanese-ness, and its anime-ness. Might Netflix see action spectacle as the commercial template to follow, leading to endless bids to replicate Chainsaw Man and Jujutsu Kaisen, but without their Japanese trappings?
Think of commercial cinema in the last quarter-century. You only need look at a few charts (like this one from the bottom up) to see how it was taken over by franchise spectacle, supplanting a once wide range of genres where people interacted without a pixel in sight. Could Chainsaw Man and Demon Slayer be to anime what The Fellowship of the Ring and the first Harry Potter were to cinema?
I’ve tended to argue the other side. Last year, I played down suggestions of Netflix being a threat to “true” anime (here) and I doubted Demon Slayer would reshape the anime industry (here). And even this month, one of Netflix’s new releases shows how anime can be spectacular and eye-catching without being an action series. It’s the British-set romance Love Through a Prism (trailer below), animated by another of the big studios, Wit. Wit, incidentally, animated both Attack on Titan and Vinland Saga before they were taken over by MAPPA.
I reviewed Love Through a Prism for Anime News Network and loved it, especially for its visual pleasures. Then again, as I mention in the review, I still prefer an older British-set period romance in anime, broadcast from 2005-7. That’s Emma – A Victorian Romance, and you can watch it on Crunchyroll. As you can see from the trailer below, Emma had rather less dazzle than Prism, though its attention to detail was still lovely.
Are such relatively “plain” but sometimes excellent anime threatened as world streamers align with the biggest studios? I hope not; but it’s with that thought in mind that I’m looking at these new anime “unspectacles” below.
Journal With Witch – There’s no witch in the series, which has already drawn some of the most enthusiastic notices of this TV season. This may partly reflect the reputation of the source manga by Tomoko Yamashita, published in the women’s magazine Feel Young. But on the basis of the first five episodes, it’s shaping up to be an exceptional anime too.
The main characters are Makio, a woman novelist living in her untidy Tokyo apartment, and Asa, her teenage niece. They didn’t know each other prior to the deaths of Asa’s father and mother in a car accident – the mother was Makio’s estranged older sister. Makio isn’t a person who makes connections easily, and yet in part one, she tells the orphaned Asa that the girl can live with her as long as she needs.
There are still big unanswered questions, such as why Makio and her sister Minori had such antipathy, and broader mysteries such as what makes Makio tick - her invitation to Asa would seem to contradict her reclusive nature. Later, we’re shown that while Makio isn’t easily social, she has close friends, mostly but not all women.
Asa doesn’t meet with convention either. The girl seems lost – she has visions is of an endless desert – but she seldom talks of her parents directly, and it’s not clear if “grief” describes her feelings so far. When she’s upset, it’s for reasons that seem tangents, like her classmates hearing about the accident (“Now everyone will only see me as the girl with dead parents!”).
One thing that draws the girl to Makio is her aunt’s insistence that there’s no right way to feel in her situation, that Asa’s feelings are her business. This reassures Asa, but daunts her too. In one scene, she thinks she’s done wrong but Makio doesn’t scold her. As a substitute, Asa visualizes her mother chiding her, then physically supporting her child self.
If it sounds hokily on the nose, the anime’s storytelling makes it natural. There are easy slides into subjectivity, some humorous, as when Asa sees two adults talking and imagines them as exotic foreigners in a distant land. Sudden flashbacks and occasional non-linear storytelling give the sense of a story where neither characters nor viewers have all the pieces, and they must live with that.
The animation itself is mostly workmanlike. What’s more striking is the storyboarding, and the use of small, disproportionately impactful details. When Makio and Asa visit the empty home of Asa’s late parents, there’s a shot of a sliding door erasing the visitors’ reflections, a quiet reminder of what death is. Later, there’s a polite, soft-spoken conversation that we realize is immensely uncomfortable for Makio. The images focus on her preparing a cup of coffee, spilling a couple of drops, then wiping them firmly away.
For many anime fans, the show’s most instantly recognizable element will be the music by Kensuke Ushio, with the signature searching piano notes that underlie such contrasting anime as A Silent Voice and Chainsaw Man. (I mentioned him in my column on the latter). There is some overlap between those anime and Journal With Witch, which all have characters troubled by their feelings and what they should feel.
But Journal With Witch also reminds me of a different drama, the series March Comes in Like a Lion (2016-8, available on Crunchyroll; I wrote about it here). Again it explores more than explains the feelings of a character after tragedy. Made by the Shaft studio, it was much more boldly impressionistic than Journal With Witch, though the latter’s quiet approach is quite valid so far, and should raise the reputation of its animation studio, Shuka, and its debut director Miyuki Oshiro.
A live-action film of the same manga opened in Japan as recently as 2024 (trailer). Such “doubling” of live-action and anime takes on the same material is a common practice in Japan, as I’ve discussed previously.
You And I Are Polar Opposites – Some readers may object to me suggesting this fizzy school romcom is unspectacular. It’s very well-made – take a bow, Lapin Track, the studio which made it. It’s bright, brash and hyperactively playful, especially in how the series switches picture styles around merrily while cramming jokes and written comments into its frames manga-style. And yet it’s far from the blood and thunder of Chainsaw Man or Demon Slayer.
The show’s visual playfulness reminds me more of Kyoto Animation’s classic sitcom Nichijou, which I’ve covered previously, though Polar Opposites has 10-times Nichijou’s Ritalin. The most obvious link between them is in their fabulous end titles, which you can compare here and here. Granted, so half of Nichijou’s appeal (and perhaps two-thirds of its artistry) was in its humor’s utter peculiarity, while Polar Opposites is a much more mainstream comedy. But the commitment to playfulness feels the same.
Nichijou had fun with the idea of mundanity, while Polar Opposites has fun with a formula; it’s this millionth anime variant on the school love story. This time, we mostly take the girl’s perspective. She’s the loudly cheery and gregarious Miyu, who harbors a crush on the boy at the next desk, the quiet and seemingly imperturbable Yusuke. This crush, naturally, fills Miyu with hidden terrors about how she might be rejected and ostracized. Even viewers irritated by her shouting in the classroom may like her more when they see her cower dejected in a toilet stall.
In part one, the story apparently reaches an abrupt happy end that might seem to rule out Polar Opposites from having anything more to do for the rest of the season. So far, though, its subsequent episodes have found ways to spin out the situation with silly jokes and sillier worries. The worries burgeon into mini-mazes of self-questioning that all boil down to “Am I doing this relationship right?” Even by the standards of a romcom, the leads have no good reason to worry about anything at all.
Yet the show’s still playing seriously. For instance, when the characters go to a cinema in part two, the film they see is shown in enough convincing detail to spin off good jokes of its own. The boy Yasuke, we see, has picked up all the names from the film, enough to do a Wikipedia synopsis if he wants. But it’s the ditzy-seeming Miyu who picks up on what the film actually means.
As for what the show itself means, there’s an underlying strand about how youngsters find their values through good and bad socializing - Peer pressure is bad; responding to the person you truly like it good. It’s obvious but sweet, and Polar Opposites’ celebration of odd couples is like Journal With Witch above, drawing some similar lessons despite the shows’ huge differences. Which, of course, makes those shows an odd couple too.
Wash it All Away – Last year, I wrote about “mellow” anime, those shows that celebrate the quietness of life, minimizing conflict and threat. (Fans like to call them iyashikei, healing, anime.) A classic of the form was Aria The Animation, also on Crunchyroll, which came out in 2005 and depicted girl gondoliers in… Well, supposedly in a Martian city, though it looked so much like Venice that you often forgot the Mars thing.
The promo video above could be viewed as mellow anime taken to parodic extremes. Yes, Wash it All Away is about a young woman, Wakana, and her modest but meticulous daily work, cleaning clothes and other items. Her small washing business is in the coastal city of Atami, famed for its onsen hot spring baths. Each episode so far, Wakana has met friends and made new ones, drawing people into what seems a monomaniacal obsession with cleaning clothes properly. This is one of those anime where a talent, sport or area of knowledge is presented as if it’s the most vital thing in the world, from fishing to ping pong.
But Wash it All Away has a particular cultural basis. Japan has an animist tradition in which “inanimate” objects are thought to have spirits; not just rocks or trees but manmade objects like clothing too. Think of it as extending Toy Story’s premise – one anime case is the series We Rent Tsukumogami on Prime Video, which I wrote up here. That Wakana sees cleaning clothes as a spiritual duty is far less odd in Japan than it would be in America or Britain.
There’s another hook to the story, given away in the above trailer. We’re blithely told Wakana has amnesia – her memory only goes back two years and her past’s a mystery. Amnesia is common in anime, given its anguished dramatic potential. Here, though, the device reinforces the idea of Wakana’s life as a bubble, all wider concerns and issues washed away, which is central to iyashikei. (Though fans of crime stories can amuse themselves thinking of all the possible reasons why Wakana might have become so good at washing in her previous life.)
I’m mildly diverted by Wash it All Away so far, though the scenery’s attractive and there’s an obvious appeal to seeing the characters enjoying high summer in a midwinter series. Some iyashikei build an engaging chemistry between their characters, but this show’s cast feels mostly bland. The liveliest is a mischievous little girl who’s so enthused by Wakana’s skill that she starts messing up her own clothes to be washed, to Wakana’s horror.
Many iyashikei series have girl leads. However, Wash it All Away feels slightly lewder than most, particularly in its framing of Wakana when she bathes in one of Atami’s many onsen. (It’s perfectly possible for anime bath scenes to be non-prurient – try Apothecary Diaries.) Crunchyroll rates the series “14+” for “sexualized imagery” – many fans will jeer at the “sexualized,” but it’s no surprise the series comes from a manga in a men’s magazine.
I’m struck, though, by how many fundamentals the series shares with one of the most beloved anime worldwide, Hayao Miyazaki’s 1989 film Kiki’s Delivery Service. They’re both stories of young females working in beautiful coastal cities, finding friends and performing duties – washing, deliveries - that are modest yet vital on a human level. And yet the anime feel so different from each other. Much of that’s to do with the main characters. Kiki has a much greater sense of insecurity, always contending with her fears and frustrations, while Wakana is mostly serene. Though if she gets her memories back…
