Columnist Andrew Osmond looks at the new TV anime ‘Witch Hat Atelier’ and ‘Daemons of the Shadow Realm,’ and also casts an ‘anime eye’ over Netflix’s recent ‘Stranger Things: Tales from ’85’ series.
Witch Hat Atelier (Crunchyroll) – Earlier this year, I fretted that anime might be taken over by action spectacles like Demon Slayer, Jujutsu Kaisen and Chainsaw Man. So far, the fantasy series Witch Hat Atelier has been a glorious rejoinder to that, showing how anime can be eye-popping without any sign of fighting formula. Not that this is a low-key drama, like last season’s outstanding Journal With Witch. The girls comprising Atelier’s heroes have already taken on a roaring dragon, while a mysterious puppet-master in a mask with one baleful eye promises to steer the story its preferred way. This stranger could be Voldemort, a Cthulhu cultist, or even a twist hero.
So far, though, Atelier isn’t a “fight” show. It’s a story of a girl learning about her world, and her place in it, and what she’ll decide to do when her learning’s done. She’s Coco, a lively girl in a world of magic. She’s always yearned to use magic despite knowing it’s impossible – it’s an inborn gift, which Coco doesn’t have. She lives with her dressmaker mother, a profession which has given Coco an affinity for drawing shapes. She’s thrilled when their home is visited by a witch – the paternal, bespectacled but handsome youth Qifrey. (Witches can be male in this world.)
Coco is even more thrilled when Qifrey makes magic, though it’s taboo for a non-witch to see the process. In a great bit of storytelling, we’re shown that Coco wouldn’t normally break the rules, but then she sees a couple of boys trying to peek, and notices an open attic door, and one thing leads to another… To her amazement, Coco sees a witch’s wand is really a pen, and that magic is drawing, creating shapes like those she’s so good at. After Qifrey departs, Coco experiments using a wand and book she was given by a stranger at a carnival. A stranger in a mask with one eye…
Then things go very wrong. By the end of Episode 1, Coco’s old life is over, and she’s in the care of Qifrey, who rushed back to see who was using forbidden magic. At first Qifrey means to wipe the girl’s mind, Men in Black style, but instead he accepts her as an apprentice, to teach the right way to use magic. For Coco, her purpose is simple; to undo the dreadful thing her magic did to her mother. For Qifrey, Coco is woven into a greater conflict, whose outcome might turn on the unknowing girl.
Witch Hat Atelier is based upon a feted fantasy manga by Kamome Shirahama, still running after 10 years and 16 volumes. I’d heard of it, but I never checked it out, deterred by the odd title. (“Atelier” is French for a garret or workshop; in the anime industry, it denotes tiny studios, providing support work.) The anime Atelier is by Bug Films, formed in 2021.
From the director of…
The director is a veteran who I covered last year, Ayumu Watanabe. His decades-long career encompasses TV and cinema, including the films Children of the Sea and Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko, and the time-bending TV horror series Summer Time Rendering (on Hulu). Another familiar credit is the writer Hiroshi Seko (Chainsaw Man, Jujutsu Kaisen, Dan Da Dan). Bug Films’ President Hirokai Kojima confirmed on his X/Twitter feed that Atelier’s production took three and a half years, exceptional for a TV anime, though you may find erroneous claims that it took even longer.
That’s understandable, because the anime looks fabulous. From the little I know of the comic, a big reason why it’s beloved is because of Kamome Shirahama’s art. There are samples here, with linework and shading far beyond manga’s norm. In the anime, it’s often the faces that stand out, strong and humane, their presence in the frame far surpassing their size.
The action can be terrific, but it’s the smaller character interactions that can have the hypnotic, liquid quality that you find in Kyoto Animation’s sublime mystery series Hyouka. I refer you to, for example, the last scene in Atelier Episode 5, after the thrilling action’s over. It’s full of delicate micro-movements and troubled expressions, the opposite of the kitschy cuteness that’s anime’s stereotype.
So far, the imagery feels on familiar ground – there’ve been plenty of anime dragon battles, for example. (My favorite is one in the first part of Vision of Escaflowne, 30 years ago.) Atelier’s first episode has a thrilling scene of Qifrey snatching up Coco in flight, but I’m more taken with Episode 3, where Coco struggles to fly in beautifully ungainly ways. It can’t help but recall Ghibli’s Kiki’s Delivery Service; the shock is the animation holds up to that standard. Try comparing Coco’s struggling flight to the fervid high-rise carnage in Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc; then ask yourself which is more involving and exciting.
Then there are small things, like the attention to Coco’s movements in Episode 1 when she runs over the roof of her mother’s home and hastens down a ladder. There are old-school establishing shots to make aesthetes purr, such as a rugged rainswept landscape at the start of Episode 3, or an animated background rushing underfoot, Laputa-style, after the titles in Episode 4.
The story also feels composed from familiar elements. A major franchise, Fullmetal Alchemist similarly started with confident kids wielding magic with terrible results. The girls who Coco meets as fellow apprentices could be from anime’s central casting. There’s a girly one, a deadpan one, and an intense, angry loner recalling Homura from Puella Magi Madoka Magica.
But I’ve seen enough long-form anime to trust the characters and premises will twist and permutate as the tale continues. Indeed, this world’s underlying principle - that the nature of magic must be hidden from the masses by a regimented elite – is ripe for subversion, hence my speculation that the masked puppeteer might be a twist hero. And while so far, the series seems like enchanting family fare, not far from most Ghiblis, it feels that could change at any time.
My main worry is that the anime could end up as a beautiful fragment, forever unfinished, except as an extended advert for the ongoing manga. Can the series continue adapting the story so splendidly? Many fans have been burned by beautiful, unfinished anime adaptations, such as Flowers of Evil with its woozy rotoscoping, Land of the Lustrous and Heavenly Delusion (aka Tengoku Daimakyo). Still, I’ll follow Coco’s story as long as Watanabe and Bug Films can tell it.
Daemons of the Shadow Realm (Crunchyroll) – If Atelier’s moral order looks ripe for subversion, then Daemons of the Shadow Realm hasn’t anything to subvert. This is one of those anime where we just don’t know who we should root for beyond the main character, putting the anime into the tradition of Princess Mononoke and classic Gundam. And even the hero might become a mass-murdering monster – it’s happened in anime before.
Six weeks in, I’m presuming it’s okay to SPOIL Episode 1. The boy Yuru is an accomplished hunter, living in what seems to be a medieval Japanese village. However, we’re tipped off in the first minutes that’s something’s amiss. Yuru looks up at a mechanical roar from the sky, sees a vapor trail and thinks it’s a flatulent dragon. Soon his village is attacked, by helicopters, but also by monsters under the command of humans. As the villagers are slaughtered, Yuru is instructed by a fatherly teacher to summon the daemons who’ve guarded his village’s gate for centuries. They’re called simply Right and Left, and they’re respectively a hulking flame-haired man and a muscled but beautiful woman.
While other reviewers have compared Episode 1 to a certain “twist” film from the 2000s, the premise is nearer Brigadoon. Yuru’s mountain village has been magically shielded from the outer world for centuries, like the hidden villages of folklore. Now, though, rival factions in modern Japan are seeking young twins, born in the village 16 years ago, who might change world history. One of the twins is a girl, Asa, who’s already aligned herself with one of those factions in the outer world; she was involved in the attack on the village. The other twin, naturally, is Yuru himself.
The anime’s early episodes follow Yuru’s flight to our modern world, helped by another of the warring factions, as he tries to work out what on earth is happening to him. As the bewildered boy contends with smartphones and flushing toilets, some anime fans may class the series as a reverse isekai, though technically Yuru was from our world all along.
For anime fans, the headline news is that Daemons is a fantasy action series based on a manga by the famed woman artist Hiromu Arakawa and animated by the Bones studio. (Or to be precise, it’s animated by Bones Film, Bones’ production department, which was spun off as a subsidiary company in 2024). Arakawa previously created another fantasy action strip, Fullmetal Alchemist, a massive hit in Anglophone territories. Bones adapted the manga twice into long TV serials; the second, more faithful version, was subtitled Brotherhood.
There isn’t time to go into Alchemist’s complex story, though I wrote an introduction to it here, focusing on Bones’ first anime version. But like Yuru, Alchemist’s protagonists were in a situation full of unknowns. They were “dogs of the military” uncertain of their leaders in a world of terrorism, war crimes and persecuted peoples. (The most recent episode of Daemons hints that the persecuted people in this series may be the Daemons themselves.)
Alchemist made implicit comments on Japan’s conduct during World War II, but it also paralleled the Iraq war of the 2000s, raging while the first anime was broadcast. In Daemons, the helicopter attack on the village in Episode 1 can’t but suggest Vietnam and the horrors of My Lai. (Japan wasn’t a combatant in Vietnam, but the country was used by America as a supplier and launchpad; for a bitter critique of this relationship, see Mamoru Oshii’s film Patlabor 2.) As in Alchemist, Arakawa is concerned to show people who are likable and kind in their ordinary lives can be capable of atrocities.
How far will this idea be followed through? Daemons’ recent episodes have been increasingly light and jokey - though some of the jokes have bite, such as a deadpan fighter’s embarrassment when he realizes a man he killed with savage efficiency a few scenes ago could have given invaluable information. The show has tipped into showing off its menagerie of daemons, many of them endowed with massive maws and goofy grins. A scene where one of these giants chases Yuru and others around the corridors of a mansion is surely a nod to No-face chasing Chihiro in Spirited Away. In cartoon terms, it’s all great fun. The daemon rabbit! The daemon tortoise! The unlikeliest daemon turning out to be a crack artist!
I’m enjoying the story, but it’s sometimes slowed down by stock anime jokes being hammered to death, especially Asa’s shameless brother complex. As for the presentation, it recalls Alchemist in how it mixes immaculate but seldom outstanding backgrounds with scrappily lively characters, always ready for cartoon deformation even in sober moments. One of the most bracing examples is in Episode 1, when a helicopter is downed by Left and Right in their primal forms, yellow lightning creatures from an elementary schooler’s painting. Daemons’ challenge going forward will be to keep its horror, humor and its ever-growing character list in some kind of gyring balance.
This is another series with a notable director. Masahiro Ando has myriad credits in storyboarding and animation, including directing and storyboarding six parts of Bones’ first Fullmetal Alchemist. He also directed the terrific 2007 samurai anime film Sword of the Stranger, as well as a wide range of series including Blast of Tempest, O Maidens in Your Savage Season (both written by Mari Okada) and the not-as-child-friendly-as-it-looks time travel show TP Bon on Netflix (But don’t confuse this Ando with the similar-sounding Masashi Ando, animation director on films by Ghibli and Satoshi Kon plus Your Name, and co-director of The Deer King.)
Stranger Things: Tales from ’85 (Netflix) – This series isn’t anime, of course. This is the recent animated 10-part spinoff from Netflix’s recently-ended live-action fantasy show Stranger Things, where intrepid youngsters fight threats from the monster-filled dimension of the Upside Down. In the new cartoon, the kids are barely in their teens. This is a midquel, set straight after Season 2, which was broadcast nearly a decade back in 2017. A cartoon continuation has been announced for Autumn.
The CG series was animated by Australia’s Flying Bark Productions, which previously contributed to a 2015 CG Heidi. That show specifically remade a seminal 1974 anime of the story by Ghibli legend Isao Takahata. Meanwhile, Tales from ‘85’s approach parallels current anime and also contrasts with it, which is why I’m writing about it here.
In this column, I’ve obsessed over the strange ways anime treats “children’s” media, releasing innocent-looking cartoons which look safe for kids at first, then turn cruel and dark. I wrote a general piece on that here; an extreme case was last summer’s Takopi’s Original Sin, covered here. Tales from ’85 is neither cruel nor dark, but it’s in similarly confusing territory.
Lighter and goofier
The live-action Stranger Things was horror-adjacent. The adversary in later seasons borrowed openly from Freddy Krueger in Nightmare on Elm Street. In Tales from ’85, the new character Nikki has a life-size Freddy figure in her “mosh pit” garage. However, the animated version turns the horror well down. It’s light-hearted and goofy, the only gore is green, and the human body count is far lower (if not zero).
Much of Tales from ‘85’s goofiness comes from the show’s capitalized TEACHABLE MOMENTS, only a hair’s breadth away from those end-of-show vignettes in kids’ cartoons where characters talk over what they’ve learned that week. Tales from ’85 only missed a trick by not giving a regular spot to the paranormal girl Eleven and her adult guardian Hopper.
All that seems straightforward, but Tales from ’85 is as conceptually odd as Takopi’s Original Sin. Like Takopi, it’s a cartoon that’s not really aimed at children but rather at adults who remember their childhood cartoons. It’s inherently knowing, yet at the same time it’s no snarky send-up like Velma or Robot Chicken.
The showrunner of Tales from ’85, Eric Robles, refers in interviews to the 1980s cartoon The Real Ghostbusters, spun off from the Ghostbusters film. But there’s a massive difference. Back in its day, The Real Ghostbusters could be watched and enjoyed by kids too young for the live-action version. In contrast, Tales from ’85 constantly assumes you’ve seen the live-action version already.
As spinoffs go, the cartoon is no more forgiving to newbies than an anime like Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle or Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc. It explains pretty much nothing for newbies (some high-speed “explaining” in Episode 2 only confirms you’re meant to know this stuff). You’re supposed to know what’s gone before and who everyone is.
While the cartoon’s story has fewer moving parts than the live-action Stranger Things – the focus is squarely on the kids, never their elders – an actual kid couldn’t start here. Granted, that kid might have seen the live-action series, if their parents let them or they can get away with it. The cartoon’s rated 10+; Stranger Things’ first live-action season was 13+, rising to 16+ from season 2.
But this makes nonsense of the idea that Tales from ’85 is a family-friendly entry to a franchise like Real Ghostbusters, or crazier toon tie-ins like Rambo: The Force of Freedom, RoboCop, Toxic Crusaders (based on Troma’s skull-smashing Toxic Avenger) and the Saturday-morning Watchmen. Okay, so Watchmen was a fan-made joke, but the others weren’t.
In-betweening the franchise
It’s not just Tales from ‘85’s “Who’s this aimed at?” qualities that remind me of anime. It contrives a storyline that must fit into a pre-existing longer story. That’s like many action anime – Naruto, Bleach, InuYasha. They’re all based on manga but invent a lot of extra in-between stories, some of them lasting whole seasons. That’s to stop the anime overtaking the manga and having to invent its own ending, as with the first Fullmetal Alchemist anime by Bones.
Anime fans often call such in-between stories “filler,” though the word has other meanings; it would be more precise to call them “TV-only.” It’s more of an issue with Tales from ’85 than with the anime I mentioned. A viewer could watch the anime InuYasha and not know which adventures were TV-only unless they’d read the manga. In Tales from ’85, though, it’s obvious we’re watching an inserted story, as this is a cartoon based on a live-action show that finished last winter.
It’s one reason why multiple reviewers have panned Tales from ‘85. We know that most of the characters can’t die or go through lasting transformations, and we also know how the “main” story ends, so what’s the point? The naysayers have also found the cartoon’s action a boring rehash of the source or lamented the waste of the medium’s potential. I myself would have liked more monsters with the wackiness of the Great Pumpkin in Episode 3.
I would have also liked to have seen the obvious alternative Stranger Things cartoon, the one that could have actually been watched by kids too young for the original. I’m talking about a reboot, condensing and simplifying the live-action show’s premise into a two-part opener, then carrying on like Real Ghostbusters with new monsters each week. Instead, Tales from ’85 tries convincing fans that this is a “real,” canonical, bit of the franchise, even with the different voices and goofy tone.
For me, I didn’t buy that for a minute, but I liked Tales from ‘85 fine. It was an entertaining, lively, lightweight adventure, the fights frantic enough to outweigh their familiarity.
I just chuckle at how, many years ago, Stranger Things’ creators, the Duffer Brothers highlighted an anime as an inspiration. It was the 2004 TV series Elfen Lied; it influenced how the Duffers depicted Eleven, the girl who breaks out of the laboratory where she’s held.
Elfen Lied starts similarly… except that its female escapee splatters a cute girl bystander during her escape. From there, the anime is a gruesome, gnarly, massively perverse show that would be unimaginable in American animation or in live-action. It culminates in a bloodbath on my favorite train in the world, the Enoden in Japan.
All of that is light years from the cheery harmless adventure of Tales from ’85. Yet I wonder if the spinoff could have been made, if not for the rise of anime since Elfen Lied. Anime used to be marketed to Westerners as not for kids. Tales from ’85 recalls a different kind of anime, the ones made to feel like kids’ shows when they’re not that at all.
