Move Over Sabrina, There's a New Witch in Town!

Last updated on: May 31, 2016 at 5:00 am by David Pollard

Move Over Sabrina, There's a New Witch in Town! 2016-05-31T05:00:15+00:00 David Pollard

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The Flying Witch is an animated Japanese television show that is currently available, subtitled in English, for Internet streaming in the US through crunchyroll.com Subscribers to the Crunchyroll service get the current episode as soon as it appears in Japan, the rest of us can watch the same episodes for free with a one week delay. Flying Witch is a very kid friendly show and should be appropriate for anyone old enough to be able to read the subtitles, and there’s enough dry, understated humor going on to keep adults engaged as well.

This anime centers on Makoto Kowata, a 15 year old witch trainee who has moved, along with her black cat familiar, from Yokohama up north to the rural, small town of Aomori. where she’s lives in her second cousin’s household. There’s also quite a bit of focus on the family she’s living with – as she’s not the only witch in her extended family. Her older sister, who shows up in Episode 4 to help with Makoto’s instruction (and couch-surf between her globe trotting escapades) is also a witch – but none of the Aomori branch of the family is. You get the distinct impression that the older members of the family know enough about their relatives as they are totally unfazed by magic, but for the youngest, 10 year old Chinatsu, she takes the first few episodes get accustomed to her new relatives and all that they bring with them.

In many ways the attitudes toward magic and witches in general make me think of this as a modern-day version of Kiki’s Delivery Service. While the similarities around the main characters are very obvious (teen-aged witch moves out from parents on a broom with her cat) also there is a general acceptance of witches as a occupational category. In Kiki’s Delivery Service this was sometime a grudging acceptance, and Makoto’s hesitancy to state that she’s a witch to strangers hints at that in this series as well – but so far (as of episode 8 of an announced 12 episode season) we haven’t been confronted with people with anti-witch bias.

Flying Witch is considered a slice-of-life show, and what the Japanese call iyashikei which roughly translates to “healing.” In short, iyashikei calms the reader and leaves them light-hearted, maybe with a hint of melancholy. One aspect that puts Flying Witch ahead of almost all other iyashikei shows is that there is also a good deal of gentle, understated, dry humor along with script-writers and voice actors who had great comedic timing.

Because of that there are some things you don’t have in this program, which are often genre regulars for most other witch-centered TV shows. There’s no demon or evil spirit vanquishing that seemed to be the main focus of Charmed, we aren’t hit over the head with the Moral of the Day in the way that most Sabrina episodes did. And although there are lots of high school aged girls in this show, there is little focus on high school and none on dating. Which leads me to think that while 15 year old Makoto is the main character, the writers of this show were expecting most of the viewers to identify with her younger 10 year old cousin, Chinatsu who starts the show very suspicious of anything magical and within a few episodes announces she wants to trained to be a witch as well.

So what kind of magic does it have? The magic in this show, other than the broom flying which is pure Western, seems to lean more towards folk magic than, Buddhist-type chanting, or the Western-style Thaumaturgy you often see depicted on screen – except that on a couple occasions Makoto freehands a flawless variant of the Seal of Solomon that includes an inscribed pentagram in about 30 seconds. Which is all the more amazing when you see than scrawl that she creates for her own personal maps so she doesn’t get lost. Maybe there’s something about initiation in becoming a witch that gives you the ability to freehand perfect circles on the fly? Really though, that I have to find something like this to nitpick about on magic, shows just how well the magic fit within the story line and the society they were depicting. Moreover, because of the rural setting, it really hammers home the deep connection between magical power and the natural cycles of life and the seasons. Supernatural figures known as “Harbinger of Spring” and “Veil of Darkness” (the Japanese equivalent to Hespera I’m guessing) are side characters.

My one regret about this show is that so far we have not seen any male character with magical powers. I’m not sure if that’s by accident or design. Apart from this, I strongly recommend this show as a great program for families. (8.5/10)

All images are from ふらいんぐうぃっち (Flying Witch) 2016 licensed in the US by Sentai Flimworks.

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