The Spring 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Maebashi Witches

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First-year high school student Yuina Akagi lives an ordinary but unsatisfying everyday life in Maebashi City in Gunma Prefecture. One day, a mysterious frog named Keroppe scouts her and four other girls to become the "Maebashi Witches." Suddenly, a room closet is connected to a mysterious space that brings the girls to a magical flower shop where they sing, dance, and make other people's wishes come true.

Maebashi Witches is an original anime project. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Sundays.

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Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

I like this show much more on paper than in reality. It sounds like a fun combination of genres – magical girls, witches, and idols, with a soupçon of regional tourism for good measure. And it is, in fact, all of those things: in Maebashi, a weird frog-thing with a zipper in his back is collecting girls to train as witches. They get to transform and sing songs to help people grant their wishes. It sounds delightful.

Regretfully, I didn't find the reality as entrancing as the premise. In large part that's because our main girl, perky pink-haired Yuina, is intensely annoying. She herself knows it: at one point she remarks that people say she gets more irritating the longer you spend with her. The rest of the cast may eventually be able to balance her out, but this first episode is primarily The Yuina Show, and the other two girls who get the most screen time also have their issues – Azu is snooty and selfish, while Choco is intended to be endearing but just comes across as not too bright. The two remaining cast , Kyoka and Mai, seem a little more balanced, but that also appears to make them uninteresting to the writers, who don't give them quite enough to do this week.

Of course, all of this could very well be intentional. Keroppe, who comments that the name Yuina gives him is treading close to copyright laws, is very overt about the action of the show. He's not quite winking at the audience, but he makes a lot of cracks that make it clear this is at least a little metafictional. He flings himself into his role as mascot character with mad abandon, asking if Yuina wants the full show when he explains things, and stopping, rewinding, and fast-forwarding the episode a few times. He's also very good with the girls, which is nice to see. When Azu has a snit about Yuina taking charge, he explains that it's not that she's in charge, but that she has the best, clearest imagination of the five, something that lets the cooler heads of Kyoka and Mai prevail.

None of this helps the pacing of the story, nor the way it feels like a video game. I was surprised that this isn't a game tie-in, but an original series, because it looks and acts very much like it comes from (or with) one. Perhaps I was thrown by Keroppe's winking mentions that he lost the “witch gacha.” In any event, while this does look good in places and uses its color-coding well (although I'm a little confused by the top of Azu's dress), it doesn't really come together into an enjoyable whole. It's a good idea executed with some serious flaws.