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I heard the the name of this title when i was still under the impression that if there’s a manga out there that is a masterpiece, I should have at least heard the name of it. I imagine looking at the way I worded the last paragraph and the score I gave on top right you won’t have a hard time guessing how I thought of myself after reading this manga.

Now I’m here after having caught up with Atelier of Witch Hat and being blown away by it in every possible direction and style thinking it’d be a good idea to try to introduce it ... to others and have more people understand what a amazing piece of art it is, using the only valid method possible, Myanimelist reviews.

So what makes Atelier of Witch Hat so special? I’m going to try to explain this in terms of art and story, and to me, the first thing coming to mind speaking of the magic in Atelier of Witch Hat is the art.

I think a lot of times there is a certain degree of leniency demanded from the readers when reading a manga. Small points of compromise that we already know we have to make to a certain extent because after all these are only some pictures put together and are all drawn by a person. These compromises might come from two places:

For example a lot of the times the drawings aren’t perfect or consistent, if you think too much you won’t find them believable and they might look rough here and there. Instead some mangas will try to have a story absorbing enough to make you invested, get your attention and eventually force you into making the compromise and ignoring the rough parts. And then there are some mangas that are the exceptions. mangas that have such high quality of art that they wouldn’t even need to bother with such concerns.

“So what’s the case with the art in Atelier of Witch Hat?”
…it is definitely of of the latter. Shapes and designs that make the world so real you get a feeling of nostalgia seeing simple objects. Characters with designs and facial expressions so abundant that you find them precious and dear to you even if it’s the first time you’re seeing them. landscapes and scenery with such detailed and creative settings that grab your interest before you’ve even gotten a good grasp of the story. All of these are more than well enough reasons to consider this manga to be a great piece of art.

BUT! this isn’t the first thing that struck me by awe when I read the first few pages of the first volume.

Going back to the two persistent factors in manga that demand compromise from the readers, The second one is the pacing of the event taking place in the story. A character appears in the first panel of a page… speaks their line…the panel ends. At this point two things are expected from the reader: move on to the next panel and then spend a slight amount of time to understand where it is that is shown on the next panel. You can’t avoid this. It isn’t a hard task in the first place and all of this process might take less than half a second, but I think the result is a feeling of disconnection which obviously is a big reason for the difference between manga and animation. manga’s try to fight off this sense of in-continuity by drawing the exact right moments, designing the most fluid panels, and of course coming up with the most interesting stories in order to draw our attention.

Atelier of Witch Hat is what happens if you perfect the methods I mentioned to the extreme.
You see, as a manga reader I’m not unfamiliar with manga that have such high quality and consistency in their drawings that make me doubt if they were drawn by hands of a human. But the special experience I had with Wicthhat’s atelier comes from more than just the art quality. Once I opened up the first page of this manga, I felt as if the opening scene of a movie start to play and before I realized I was sucked into a movie that had about half an hour of runtime only to realize I was just reading the first volume a manga the entire time.

Atelier of Witch Hat doesn’t just present you with beautiful pieces of drawings but confronts you with masterfully choreographed pages devoted into giving you the most fluid experience when reading. as you turn over each page you see panels designed in a way that makes you feel emotions before you’ve even started reading anything. moving from a panel is not accompanied by a sense of pause and it’s as if you can follow the characters and the objects moving freely between one place to another with your eyes. Everything is flowing so naturally that looking back later on I’m not entirely sure if there wasn’t a background music being played during all of this.

This is where the magic of Atelier of Witch Hat comes into play and gives you a special experience and this is why I need you to give this a try even if you haven’t heard of it’s name before or don’t like stories of girls in fantasy worlds full of magic.

“So what about the story? is this it? just a very beautifully drawn story about little girls in fantasy world?”

The short is answer is no.

The long answer is Atelier of Witch Hat is a well crafted and delicate story that introduces you to character you can easily understand and relate to.
This is the kind of story that puts a lot more focus on journey of each character and their motives, it also touches on subjects such as freedom and limitations, the chaos that can be caused by having too much freedom , the sacrifices that need to be made in order follow those limitations and how hope can find its place in all of this. Sometimes it looks like a optimistic world about happy girls solving their problems and sometimes it looks like a dark and violent world where there is barely any hope for things to get fixed. the beauty of it is in how effective it is at taking you along the ups and down of its journey. Because of how every character is depicted so lovely and because of how easy it is to understand their actions and motives it becomes common to find yourself happy when you see the people in the story being kind with each over simple things and to feel down when they they lose hope in the face of their problems.

as it seems to be the theme with this manga. the world building being the framework in which the story is taking place is one crafted with great attention to details. the settings and systems created, even though they’re using magic in their core, make just enough sense for you be amazed every time you learn about the way they work. Reading along the story and getting a better understanding of the magic system eventually lead up to moments that give you a sense of awe and once you meet structures that are called “miracles” by the main character you can’t help but find yourself agreeing with them.

At the end, I can’t help but think everything in this manga is designed in a way that would give joy to its reader. Some stories might be written to transfer some kind of message, some are told in a way to transfer the author’s emotions; Most mangas have both of those as part of their purpose. Atelier of Witch Hat is not an exception. But the message behind the events, the emotions it tries to instill, and even the art style that it tries to perfect, all come after one question, and that’s wether the audience can enjoy it or not. I enjoyed reading manga a lot and hope you do the same.
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Watching this constantly reminded me of ghibli movies, incredibly beautiful with a detailed world but also a bit weird and most importantly very deep.

I found the story really charming. Its story is pretty straight forward and the event that happen are pretty predictable but even then despite the fact that I feel somewhat fed up with this classic way of story telling the story of A Whisker Away stood out to me because of how deep it explored and built its characters. This is a story about coming into terms with others, and accepting the world for what it is and it didn’t take me ... long to fall in love with the main character, because of the amount of time the movie spent on building up her motivations and explaining her way of thinking.

And of course the art looked astonishing and that made everything even more enjoyable to watch and digest.

All in all I found the entirety of the movie a joy to watch and it’s likely that I’ll rewatch it some time again. So if you’re also a fan of deep character exploration with A satisfying story that takes a place in a very beautiful world then I say give this movie a watch because you’re most likely going to like it.

This is what kill la kill is: inconsistent, unreasonable, pretentious, repetitive but also cool, exciting and somewhat satisfying.

Here’s an story that I think encapsulates the experience of watching kill la kill the best:
You’re walking down a street when grabs your hand, drags you into a theatre and forces you to take a seat. He then goes on to tell you that you’re about to witness a performance take place and commands you to absolutely not ask any questions.

then you’re handed a piece of paper which gives you the name of the characters, a brief explanation of their motives and an exclamation of wether ... they are the good guys or the bad guys. It also includes a paragraph full of obligatory so called “meaningful and deep messages” that seems to be there for absolutely no reason other than making sure the producers feel good about calling what they created “a story”.

Next thing you see is group of people appearing on the stage in very revealing but cool costumes engaging in a seemingly important and intense battle about which if you need any informations you need to look back at the paper handed to you before.

That’s it. That’s how deep kill la kill really is. Once studio trigger go through all the mentioned procedures they finally feel safe to send their characters into the space and “not even my final form” their show up until the very last moment Of the last episode.

To me during the entirety of the show it felt like kill la kill was trying hard to force you to accept that things on the screen have a deeper meaning; that the obnoxious amount of nudity and other more offensive themes are something that you have to be ok with. this process of forcing myself to be patient with all the inconsistencies, flaws and the famously excessive and sometimes aggressive themes of sexuality being pushed down my throat and getting back little to nothing in return was ultimately what made it very hard for me to not hate it and just pretend it’s an ok action show.

The action scenes are good. The characters look and sound very cool and the story isn’t exactly boring so I can very much see how this show can be appealing to the people that are forgiving; which means if you have no trouble sitting through unreasonable amounts of nudity and some other heavier themes; don’t have a problem with events that make absolutely no sense; can easily overlook unreasonable inconsistency in power levels and are really desperately looking for some good looking fighting animations with arguably mediocre hyped up moments then this is for you; otherwise this is most likely going to feel like a waste of your time.

Anyway, I wrote this simply because it’s fun to write down several paragraphs about why you think a certain popular show sucks and also because I had nothing else to do so thank you for reading and good luck.