The Witch and the Beast

There's a good deal I like about this series. It presents an intriguing set of characters that get more interesting as the series progresses. It's got a visual style that really pops with a great deal of magical flair, and you can feel the weight of its fights. I also like the world-building and place-setting this series has done for its next season. And that's the biggest knock I have against it: it does just seem like place-setting for the next season. It's not so much that this is a slow start - we start and finish several short arcs back-to-back over the course of thisseason, all of which have their own little intrigues as various mysteries are solved - but rather that the series seems just fine getting side-tracked as often as possible. The first two episodes set up a central plotline for the series for us to follow: Guideau travels with Ashaf under the auspices of a larger magical organization to hunt down witches with the aim of finding a specific one that cursed her and ending her. She doesn't really know what the witch looks like (I initially thought this was a Dorohedoro situation where the lead just didn't know who his target was, but it's a little more complicated in this case), but she should be able to narrow the field, get the curse removed, and return to a powerful body that Ashaf carries around with him in a coffin similar to Wolfwood from Trigun. So, what I expected was to see them run into a series of witches, gathering clues and getting closer to their goal before having some big finale engagement. And... well, we kind of get that... if you ignore a couple of other short arcs in the middle. To be fair, all the side-tracks the series takes are interesting in their own rights and do establish more of the rules and basic concepts of this world, particularly in who can use magic and how. In one particularly interesting aside, we follow a necromancer and get to see what a completely distinct type of magic can do. It's honestly some of my favorite stuff in the series. But that's the problem: I don't think the central plot has gotten interesting. They've run into a few witches, dealt with a variety of magic, and bent the rules a bit with the curse so that we can see what Guideu's original form looks like. And yeah, it leads to some cool stuff. The problem is that I don't have much reason to get behind Guideau. I know next to nothing about her motivations beyond wanting her body back. Ashaf remains a bit of an enigma. Honestly, we get to know more of the side characters better than we do these two. And that's not necessarily a big deal, but there's also very little in the way of character growth for either of them, and even when we arrive at key climactic moments, they just don't have the emotional heft to make them feel terribly meaningful. Finally, while I wanted to give this a higher score, it ended up being brought down a little by its final couple of episodes. The backstory helped establish a bit about their background together, which is nice, but it felt like an odd arc to leave us on. Combine that with an exposition dump from Ashaf that sets up some very interesting bits of worldbuilding that I'm legitimately excited to see in S2 and, honestly, it made the ending feel like more of a tease for S2 than anything meaningful to this season. Still, I enjoyed the ride. I want to see more of these characters and learn more about them. I just wish they'd focused their efforts better in this season.

The fact that this anime has so many negative or mixed reviews truly tests my faith in the MAL community, simply because I enjoyed it so much. This one is really a hidden gem, I stumbled upon it on a whim and thought that the short synopsis and cover art looked interesting, and WOW am I glad I gave it a chance. Admittedly the first few episodes aren't the greatest, even though I still liked them, the show truly shines as the viewer is given more glimpses into the dark and supernatural world of "The Witch And The Beast." As others have pointed out the worldbuilding is absolutely phenomenal. It's quite rare that I'm so enchanted by an anime's lore and world that I transition to the manga after finishing the show, but I simply couldn't help myself after finishing this one. The magical system and the lore associated with the witches, mages, necromancers, church, The Order, etc. seems quite deep and complex once you get further into the series. I like that the anime doesn't shy away from violence and gore as this accentuates the evil actions of the villains and occasionally even the protagonists. I've seen some people criticize the animation but I personally had zero issue with the animation and actually thought it was quite sharp, although I have to admit I don't have an eye for these things. In terms of the writing and dialogue it's nothing special but I didn't think it was bad either. For the most part, the interesting relationships between some of the characters make up for any shoddy writing decisions. My main critique is that the second protagonist, Guideau, is too much of a one dimensional character who lacks any real depth (so far). Overall, I urge viewers to at least get to the six episode mark before making their decisions on this anime's quality. If you're someone who enjoys dark, grim, and gritty anime with horrific super natural villainy, then you will almost certainly enjoy "Majo to Yajuu."

The Witch and the Beast. Ashaf and Guideau hunt the supernatural. Guideau is in it to hunt witches. Specifically a witch that put a curse on her. Ashaf is a cool headed spellcaster. He's the brains who also knows how to talk his way out of sticky situations. While Guideau is the muscles, and a hot head. Who punches her way out of sticky situations. The way the 2 main characters are total opposites create a great dynamic between the two. I find the way Guideau's fights are choreographed can be lacking. They are not fun to watch and are anticlimactic. Bad choreographed fights is unfortunatelya common problem with action anime. I wont get into too much specifics but for example at one point this very super powerful enemy is unleashed...and the entire fight is just dull. The way Ashaf "fights" tend to be more interesting. Since he's not over powered. He's just clever. Its a very nicely written anime. Cool characters. Interesting powers. The art style is nice to look at. Maybe the flow of the story needs improving.

The plotline/premise is a lot like Dorohedoro and Undead Girl Murder Farce, except this is incredibly generic and shallow shonen action cringe that takes itself way too seriously while failing miserably to actually be seinen. These characters are all cardboard cutouts we learn almost nothing about and what we do learn amounts to: generically evil witch, generically persecuted good witch, generically evil executioners, generically good mage society, generically angry MC, etc. Shonen trope hell. If it weren't shonen it would actually put effort to have meaningful character depth to give any of it emotional weight. The world is generic. The interactions are contrived. The exposition is cringe.The pacing of everything is slow, practically just slow fps sloth dialogue to monotonously overexplain exposition and feelings stretching out everything with filler within filler. (For example: the cringiest scene where MC retardedly didn't kiss the witch to be able to immediately overcome all obstacles because partner spoonfed some dumbass excuse not to, so instead MC is flung out a window while having an entire conversation with the witch about the power of cringe and tryharding drawing out 2 seconds into the most cringe conversation that painfully refuses to end...) (The story randomly jumps into an entire filler arc following characters completely unrelated to the MCs and plot.) (It also takes 1 episode to introduce a plot hole since each witch body has a max lifespan of 200 years, the witch's grandmother was murdered for sealing the fire 417 yrs ago yet her granddaughter witch and her mother witch could've lived for no more than 400yrs combined at the absolute max making it impossible for granny's daughter to have been born until long after granny had already died. So we have a witch dedicating decades of her life to an absurd plot to kill innocent people as revenge for a woman she never knew who died over 200 yrs before she was even born, literally hamfistedly retarded being the very thing she hates, all conveyed via braindead exposition dump mid-fight. All when she could've just done this decade long plan in 1 night from the start but Main Character Syndrome dictates that it must be exactly the night the MCs show up on a job to see her for no reason. (The season ending mystery involves the exact same contrivance of baddies doing a retarded plot for half a year to betray exactly when the MCs show up when they could've just done it in 1 night from the start.) The writing is unbelievably dumb. Some people claim that the art is bad compared to the manga, but I checked and past the first few pages' bait and switch, the manga art is mostly terrible. The way the mangaka draws black haired MC is hilariously bad. This anime is frankly good art/animation quality, and the voice acting of the dub has good emotion and all, just sucks the dialogue is mostly exposition. All that said, this anime is underrated/better compared to most cringe shonen here, probably so much dislike because it opens with a random goofy giant shark running through the city on 2 legs, dumb as hell cringe for no real reason but it more or less foreshadows exactly how cringe the author's storytelling/worldbuilding is. This season ends up being mostly just a pointless introduction that goes nowhere as bait for s2/manga but based on the mile-wide inch-deep multiworlds of generic fantasy cringe story the author set up, I'd assume 'vampire world' is just going to be more jumping-the-shark shonen trash. (*I checked and it is terrible) It really could've been good if not for the writing. At least it's above the mountains of shonen/rom-com/SoL trash. 5/10 (where 5/10 is average)