Witch Hat Atelier ‒ Episodes 1-3

© Kamome Shirahama/KODANSHA/ Witch Hat Atelier Committee

Power is magic. With enough power, you can do whatever you want, rules and laws be damned – or at least, that's what those with power want us to believe. And people in power are very, very reluctant to share it. Although it sounds like I'm talking about contemporary politics, Witch Hat Atelier is, in many ways, about the reluctance to share power. It's framed as for people's own good: when everyone could use magic, terrible forbidden spells wreaked havoc on the world. Just look at what happens to poor Coco in episode one – she unwittingly uses a spell and petrifies her mother. It's the terrible warning made flesh.

There's certainly room to debate whether it was the spell, the user, or the lack of information about magic that doomed Coco's mother, though. After Coco's discovery that anyone can draw spells, she's given a concrete example as to why that's not necessarily a good thing. But do you blame the girl or do you blame the system that forbade her from learning in the first place?

Obviously, these are questions that will be carried through the series, which is part of what makes the source manga so good. But already in these first three episodes, we get a picture of the world Coco lives in and its magic system. Although it was different in the past, in Coco's time, only those born of witch bloodlines could use magic. Everyone else is forbidden from casting spells, and time has leaned into the lie that it's because only witch-born have the ability to use them. It's a system perhaps not intentionally designed to keep certain people down, but it has artificially divided them into two groups, the haves and have-nots. Although witches can create “contraptions,” magical devices usable by anyone (but mostly the wealthy), they keep most magic to themselves and have strict rules in place about what magic is allowed to do.

The witches themselves are divided into two major groups: those who wear brimmed caps and those who wear brimless caps. While the anime hasn't yet gotten into the symbolic difference between the two styles, we do know that the Brimmed Caps are considered dangerous because they don't respect the laws that say only certain types of spells can be cast – or that magic can only be cast by certain people. That's how Coco ends up with the spellbook and magic pen that turns her mother to stone: a Brimmed Cap witch gave them to her at a festival. The witch liked Coco's love of magic, which suggests that perhaps they don't have entirely nefarious purposes, although it's far too early to know.

But whatever their reason, it certainly seems like Coco is following the path laid out for her. Not only has she cast magic, but she's taken in by Qifrey, a brimless witch, as his apprentice. He does appear to genuinely worry about the girl suddenly left on her own, but he also definitely has an ulterior motive of his own. Coco is the clearest link to the Brimmed Caps that he's found (and why he's interested in them is another unanswered question), and he's not going to lose her. If he has to play into their hands by taking her on as his apprentice, he'll do it. I can't help but think that he's curious to see if she can be made into a true brimless witch, but I'm not sure why that would be. Despite his apparent kindness, I feel like he needs to be taken with at least a grain of salt, and his acquaintance Alaira seems to as well. Why does he insist on living so far away from the witches' Lyonesse-like underwater city?

While we have more questions than answers at this point, one thing we absolutely do know is that Qifrey is an anomaly. Tetia and Riceh, two of his other apprentices, seem fine with Coco, but Agott, the third, is emphatically not. Agott may well be the stand-in for witch society at large. She resents Coco for no reason other than that she's an “Outsider,” to the point where she takes advantage of Qifrey's absence to send her off on a potentially deadly quest. Did Agott actually want Coco to die? I'm not sure, but I honestly can't shake the thought that she might have. Twelve is absolutely old enough to understand the danger she sent the unprepared girl into. The scene of her feeding logs into the fire while Tetia freaks out is chilling – and the way she hangs back when Qifrey hears what happened from the other girls says that she knows what she did was wrong.

Maybe she didn't assume that Coco would die. She may, in the way of teenage and preteen bullies, just have wanted to “teach her a lesson.” But she also clearly knew better, and Coco, by presenting her with the flower, lets Qifrey know precisely who sent her into those floating mountains.

I've already written a lot without even touching on Coco's resourcefulness during her test. The way she uses the skills her mother taught her is both beautiful and heartwarming, because she appreciates the magic in the everyday. The animation and art absolutely enhance this, with Shirahama's original picture-book aesthetic made even more real through pop-up books for the intros and outros, and the Japanese cast is exquisite. The dub cast…doesn't really do it for me; I understand the desire to give everyone accents to show the breadth of the magical world, but I find it distracting.

The story, fortunately, holds up no matter what the language. Magic doesn't require spells, and Witch Hat Atelier is a story that combines the fantastic with everyday as it examines power and how it takes form.

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Witch Hat Atelier is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.