While old stories would have you believe that witches are withered old women with warts stirring a pot of newt’s eyes, but anime has rewritten the narrative a bit. Witch anime runs the gamut having witches fighting for the forces of good or doing the devil’s work all the way to them doing nothing but happily living their lightly magic-laced lives.
If witches and witchcraft are stories that captivate your interest with their spells, then give these anime recommendations a try.
Witch Anime
The Flying Witch
Not every witch anime need to be sinister or even action-packed. The Flying Witch resonates more with the side of witchcraft that is about connecting and communing with nature – though not without a fair bit of actual magic involved.
The Flying Witch follows a young witch who goes to stay with her cousins in the countryside. The rural area is supposedly the perfect place to hone her witchcraft as it is rife with more natural energy that is not found in more developed areas. So, that’s what she does – she hones.
The Flying Witch is a slice of life series with little in the way of actual plot. You watch the main character enjoy time with her family while also exploring the local area and working on her magic. It is an excellent cozy anime to unwind with and captures some excellent summer visuals.
Wandering Witch – The Journey of Elaina
In the world of the Wandering Witch, witches are looked upon with prestige due to how rare it is to have magic in their blood let alone pass the number of tests it requires to earn the title of witch.
Inspired by the stories of a wandering witch that he mother told her as a child, Elaina worked hard to become a witch in order to go on a journey of her own.
While that sounds like the perfect magical set up for a wholesome story, Wandering Witch actually tells a wide array of stories. Some are rather nice while others are incredibly dark. Furthermore, Elaina is a complex if not divisive character, not the stereotypical good-natured helpful witch that you might have expected to see in a series like this.
Maria the Virgin Witch
While anime widely eschews more traditional witch stories, Maria the Virgin Witch at least gets a bit closer by being set in a historical era where witchcraft was at least more common.
Maria the Virgin Witch takes place during the Hundreds Year War between England and France. Upon seeing how much the common people suffer in war, a witch has been using her magic to try and intervene, only to be warned by the gods to stop. They threaten that, if she keeps going, she will lose her magic when she loses her virginity. With such a warning, you just know that she is both not going to stop and in imminent danger of falling in love.
The Witch and The Beast
The Witch and The Beast showcases witches in their more sinister form. This visually stunning series follows a pair of mysterious witch hunters whose personalities mix like oil and water, but they agree on one thing – where witches go, evil follows.
The series depicts witches in a variety of ways, but even if a witch appears to be helping something thrive, there is always evil behind the facade.
Little Witch Academia
Like many an anime, Little Witch Academia follows a bright-eyed new student on her first day of school. However, she is a human girl who, after being captivated by a traveling magic show performed by a witch as a child, enrolled in a school to learn witchcraft.
While she doesn’t quite have the aptitude of natural-born witches and discovers that her childhood hero is widely considered a charlatan in the witch world, there is nothing that can deter her from following her dreams.
As these things go, she makes new friends in school, but also stumbles into a series of intrigues that threaten the school’s existence.
Izetta – The Last Witch
As a war story, Izetta features the definitely fictional country of Germania bringing tanks to a gun fight and starting a devastating war with the weaker country of Elystadt. However, what beats blitzkrieg in this roshambo? A witch riding a .50 caliber rifle instead of a broomstick.
And that’s not facetiousness either.
Izetta The Last Witch follows the captured princess of of Elystadt meeting up with her childhood friend who is also the last witch left in the world during captivity, allowing the pair of them to mount a counter-offensive that may save their country.
The Ancient Magus’ Bride
While no one is really called witch in so many words in The Ancient Magus’ Bride, the mages in this series capture both the whimsy and malice that should be presented hand-in-hand when it comes to witchcraft.
This series follows a girl whose rare magic attracts both good and bad spirits. After her parents abandoned her and she was shunned by her relatives, she sold herself into slavery and was purchased by a skull-faced mage. He seeks to teach her how to control her rare magic while also hoping his new apprentice will someday consider being his bride.
Unlike many witch anime that sort of makes up their own lore, The Ancient Magus’ Bride brings to life fae creatures like leannan sidhe, church grims, and the wild hunt from Celtic mythology in all their anime glory. As a series that really does its due diligence when it comes to building a magical world that exists in secret from modern society, it truly becomes a world that you can get lost in.
Witch Hunter Robin
Just like it says in the title, Witch Hunter Robin follows a witch hunter, coincidentally, named Robin. The series takes place in a world where witches often cause problems with their magic. As such, the Vatican has started taking young girls with the talent for magic, raising them, and dispatching them to aid non-magical witch hunting organizations.
Robin is one such girl sent by the Vatican to Japan in order to use her fire abilities to support a small group of witch hunters. As they work together, the group begins to unravel the dark truth of what is happening to the witches that they are capturing.
Tweeny Witches
Tweeny Witches provides the fun and whimsy that one wants with witchcraft and the rare dash of darkness that is usually associated with it.
Tweeny Witches features a human girl who is enamored with magic and believes with all her heart that it exists. She finds that pretty true when she falls into another realm ruled over by witches. However, in this realm, magic is used as a tool for oppression rather than the facilitator of dreams that she had hoped.
This series offers all the energy of a series like Little Witch Academia, but with a higher amount of darkness and mature themes that Little Witch Academia often lacked. Magic isn’t always magical, and Tweeny Witches lets you know it.
The Kingdoms of Ruin
While witches in our world often met a pretty grim fate throughout history, anime tends to widely ignore that when using witches as characters – not Kingdoms of Ruin, though. This series builds a plot around the prosecution of witches.
In the fictional world of The Kingdoms of Ruin, witches were created by the goddess in order to help humanity. However, as humanity invented and increasingly relied on technology, the emperor of a great empire decided that witches were a curse rather than a boon. Thus began the age of witch hunts where witches were publicly and brutally slaughtered in front of cheering crowds.
This happened to the mentor of a young human boy who had been gifted with magic by her. After years of imprisonment after this event, he goes on a bloody spree of revenge to avenge her. Unfortunately, his hatred runs so deep for humanity, that he is willing to sacrifice even other witches to destroy everything.
As you can expect, The Kingdoms of Ruin is a bit edgier than many other witch anime, but like any edgy revenge story, it is ripe for redemption.
Witchcraft Works
Witchcraft Works is the tale of a war between two factions of witches and a normal human boy caught right in the middle as their target.
It turns out that the popular and beloved girl at his school was actually serving as his bodyguard for her faction in order to prevent him from being taken by the other faction of witches. Within his body is so-called “white stuff” that the organization targeting him hopes to extract.
As purposefully lewd as that sounds, the “white stuff” is actually the essence of a powerful entity that is sealed within him. However, while that lewd mix-up is cleared up pretty quick, Witchcraft Works remains a more provocative watch.
The Family Circumstances of the Irregular Witch
If you were looking for something more wholesome, but with still enough magical flavor, then The Family Circumstances of the Irregular Witch is for you. It tells a cute story, but doesn’t neuter out the magical lore of witches to do it either.
The Family Circumstances of the Irregular Witch follows a youthful-looking witch who finds a baby girl in the woods. After not finding who she belongs to, she decides to raise her as he own daughter. Sixteen years later, her daughter has grown up enough that most people mistake her as older than her own still young-looking mother.
From there, this rather plotless series explores their wholesome life together as daughter dotes on mother and mother tries to teach daughter how to better wield her strong magical aptitude. This daily routine is frequently shaken up by the weird variety of creatures and other witches that come to visit them in their secluded forest home.
Umineko: When They Cry
Unlike many other anime on this list, Umineko doesn’t put a witch in the main character seat per-say, but it does definitely have a witch serving as the major character driving the plot.
This often sinister and mysterious series follows a large, wealthy family that are gathered on their private island by the family patriarch to discuss his inheritance when the ailing man passes. After a typhoon strands them there, they discover that the old man has passed away and the family has been rocked by several murders in the night.
A witch named Beatrice, whose portrait hangs in the home and who was rumored to saved the family from ruin years ago, claims responsibility for the deaths and states that she intends to take back everything from the family.
From there, you indulge in a murder mystery that always has another rapid twist to add to its plot.
Iroduku: The World in Colors
Iroduku offers a more modern glimpse at witchcraft by taking place in a world where magic is almost completely exhausted. However, one elderly witch uses the last of the magic she can gather to send her socially-secluded grand-daughter back in time where she will meet her grandmother as a teenager as well as her friends in hopes that she will make some meaningful bonds.
So while Iroduku starts in a world where magic has all but died out, the series actually takes place several decades prior to that were witches were waning and magic was seen as more of a pleasant little gift that was bottled and sold as a small trinket.
While not the grandest magical series about witchcraft, it does at least try to be innovative in its display of a world that was once filled with magic now transitioning to being fully without it.
Puella Magi Madoka Magica
What are magical girls if not witches by a more anime name? Madoka Magica helps remind us that magical girls really are often just cute versions of witches by injecting some of the darkness back in there.
This series that really cemented the idea of “dark magical girls‘” in the modern anime zeitgeist features two friends given the opportunity to become magical girls and have their fondest wish granted in return for fighting evil witches. While one accepts right away, the other dwells on the choice. Not only because she doesn’t know what she would wish for, but because a mysterious transfer student seems dead-set on her not accepting.
This series delves deep into a darker reality for magical girls. It isn’t about defeating evil with the pastel power of friendship, but instead offers a world where if a magical girl doesn’t die brutally in battle, she will face a worse fate later.
Do you have more anime about witches and witchcraft? Let fans know in the comments section below.
