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Witch Hat Atelier
とんがり帽子のアトリエ
2026 · TV series · 24 min episodes · 1 season
AnimationDramaScience FictionFantasy
In a world where only witches can cast magic, they must avoid being seen by ordinary people while casting. While Coco does her chores, she daydreams of becoming a witch. When a young witch named Qifrey visits her village, Coco uncovers the “absolute secret,” becomes Qifrey’s apprentice, and begins her studies. This is the story of children who encounter despair, yet reach out toward hope.
2 positivefrom 2 commenters
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2 comments on Hacker News
Ultimately animation is built targeting a budget: From the oldest animes with massive animation reuse and very low fps to complicated things that mix 3d and 2d. It's all a multi-decade race to make anime people enjoy for a budget the studio will pay. Almost every animation project done today (barring, say, the failure of Blue Lock S2, or Uzumaki past ep1) is has more animation per episode than most series in the 90s. Something like Witch Hat Atelier looks competitive with Ghibli movies, but it comes in 12 episode seasons: So far more animation total!
It's precisely the competition, and the quest for more quality for the buck, that leads to more foreign animation, more AI, or more 3d models. If people were animating like the old days, with hand-drawn cels photographed in complex rigs, we'd not get the same actual amount of animation made, and it'd be worse, just because the cost per series would be so high very little animation would be funded, and it'd be just for smash hits with big worldwide audience potential, not, say, series about rakugo. We optimize for output, and it often meands outsourcing and higher level tooling, which will include AI in one form or another.
We are in tech here, we have to understand there's big advantages to this for consumers.
Even if we're still far from the golden age, Dandadan (Science SARU; though I've heard the sheer effort bankrupted them) and the recent Witch Hat Atelier (Bug Films) are quite nice to behold.
Some modern romcoms like Kaguya-sama (A-1 Pictures) and The Dangers in My Heart (Shin-Ei) were nicely done too.
Things are obviously not going in the right direction, but the current accelerated fall in quality the consumer sees is more influenced by general unwillingness to spend and/or take risks from bean counting production committees.