The Winter 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Champignon Witch

Luna is a witch who lives in the black forest and is feared by others. People refer to her as the Champignon Witch because wherever she walks, talks, and touches, poisonous mushrooms grow. The story follows the first love of this woman, who has previously not known the warmth of another person.

Champignon Witch is based on Tachibana Higuchi's Champignon no Majo (Champignon Witch) manga. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

These two episodes tell a complete story. It's not the complete story, of course – but it lets us know how Luna the Champignon Witch reached a specific point in her life, and as bittersweet as it is, it's still important. So yes, this really did need to be a two-episode premiere.

This is, effectively, the prologue of Luna's story. It unfolds like a cruel fairy tale (so one before Disney got ahold of them): Luna is a black witch with an affinity for poisonous mushrooms. They sprout in her wake, and anyone who touches her sickens and dies from their poison. But despite her age (we're told she's older than she looks), Luna is still a young woman, and she wants to fall in love. When she sees a handsome young man named Henri in town, she goes home and draws him, and he can visit and touch her through his paper avatar. Henri falls for Luna as well, but it is not to be, and Luna is forced to remove his memories of and love for her to save him. And so the witch returns to her forest with her animal friends, and time passes…until one day, a handsome young man stabbed through the heart washes up in the river.

While these two episodes are filled with a lot of static shots, I think it works. For one thing, other details are nicely done, such as the change in the way people dress between Luna's last encounter with Henri and the way she and the mysterious boy are dressed at the end of episode two. She also wears multiple outfits, which is pretty unusual for a show that isn't specifically about fashion. Many of the stills have the air of a picture book, which also works well for the way the story is told – with a narrator doing most of the talking, like they're reading us a bedtime story. Other visual details, like how expressive the mushrooms are, help to make up for limited animation.

You can tell immediately from the character designs that this is from the creator of Gakuen Alice, and I'll admit that that's one of my favorite series. Tachibana Higuchi has a gift for bittersweetness mixed with cuteness, and that's on display here. It's interesting to think that there's no Mikan to balance out the darker elements. Henri comes close, but he's part of the sadness, which says a lot. While Mikan was about to inject some light into Alice Academy, Luna didn't have someone like that. She's got her animal friends, Merino, Minos, and a few others, and Claude, the crow boy, but she's otherwise on her own…at least, as of these two episodes. Maybe it's not that a Mikan character doesn't exist so much as that one hasn't come in yet.

I wouldn't be me if I didn't point out that this is working with at least a few fairy tale themes. The way that mushrooms grow where Luna treads is a callback to ATU480, The Kind and the Unkind Girls; in that tale type, the “kind” daughter has diamonds and gems spill from her mouth when she speaks, while the “unkind” daughter spews snakes and frogs. This lines up with the way the townsfolk view her, her actual kindness notwithstanding. We get a glimpse of a Cinderella story at one point, and, of course, Luna's red-hooded cape is a nod to ATU333, Little Red Riding Hood. Usually, Red is the victim in most well-known versions of that story, but there is one variant from the Champagne region of France that I think is worth remembering. In Charles Marelles' “Little Golden Hood,” the girl's grandmother is a witch, and the hood she sews for her granddaughter protects her from the wolf. I'd like to think that's the variant this show is working with…and that for Luna, her magic will allow her a happy ending.

Why do fairy tales exist? Why do we continue to tell children the same stories for hundreds of years? Sure, each of them comes with a bit of magic and wonder, but they also come with some sort of moral or lesson—something important to learn and understand as a tiny human.

Here's my issue with these first two episodes of Champignon Witch: While it follows all the beats of a fairy tale when it comes to its plot and characters, what is the moral of the story? Is it supposed to be that you shouldn't try to be with others who are not like you? Is it that you can't trust your loved ones to care for themselves, so you may need to make decisions for them? Is it simply that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover—even when it has a reputation for being dangerous (and actually is)? I'm honestly not sure—which is a problem.

On the story side, I also feel there is no clear direction or purpose to the show, even after an hour. Luna lives outside of the village with her spirit friends, but still provides the town with medicine (even if they don't know it comes from her). She is tolerated in town, with a few people even being cordial to her, if not a bit overly wary. These two episodes are about her first time falling in love and how it doesn't go as either had hoped due to both magic shenanigans and the social stigma against Black Witches. That said, I'm not sure what the point of this story is.

I guess what I truly don't have a grasp on is the tone of the series. It tries so often to be cute and comical that I'm not sure what amount of danger Luna is facing—or if there really is any. How powerful is her magic? Can a normal man—or even a group of them—hope to capture her with her poison breath and skin? And along that train of thought, why hasn't she been hunted down yet? It's not like her existence is a secret, nor do the townspeople feel indebted to her. If acquaintances of witches are being killed in the town square, why is she able to saunter on through on a regular basis?

But the most telling thing about this show is that, even after two episodes, I don't have a burning need to have any of these numerous questions answered. The show has failed to hook me, and I won't be back for another episode.

To repeat a joke I made elsewhere: mushrooms are everywhere these days. They are to the 2020s what “put a bird on it” was to the 2010s. We've had a few mushroom people in anime before, such as En from Dorohedoro, but with very, very different vibes. Champignon Witch aims for a fairy-tale sensibility and largely succeeds, at least in the first two episodes.

I had my doubts that it would work. Champignon Witch shares a studio and director with Dahlia in Bloom, a production disaster that was riddled with distracting animation shortcuts, including universal slanted shadows that never made sense with the scene's lighting. Frankly, I'm surprised Yōsuke Kubo is still allowed to work in the industry after that. I suppose at the rate anime is being made, anyone will do, even the studio behind troubled productions like Haigakura.

Champignon Witch is at least a somewhat competent production. If nothing else, I can acknowledge that they found ways to make their own shortcomings work in context. The two episodes have a strong fairy tale vibe, with the kind of story I wouldn't be surprised to find in a lavishly-bound hardcover of public domain fables. The production intentionally emphasizes the storybook sensibilities of the work; while normally I'd complain about excess narration that tells rather than shows, here it felt a bit like being read to. The simplified character art and sepia-tinted medieval town backgrounds further contribute to the atmosphere. Stylistic choices like these are far more important to the final product than fluid animation alone, and a bit of ingenuity can stretch a limited budget. The only obtrusively poor animation comes, unfortunately, in the opening sequence, when Luna is surrounded by jagged aliasing, a telltale sign that she is cut and pasted against the background.

Although I'm skeptical that this needed to be another two-episode premiere, the short story presented has a beautiful sense of melancholy and isolation. Luna's loneliness and disconnection don't stem just from the people of the town fearing her powers; there's a systemically driven hatred of black witches in the town. She also poses a real danger to the people of the town, since skin-to-skin contact causes them to rot and die on the spot, a la Cardia of Code:Realize. Despite this, she manages to connect with Henri, a golden retriever-like boy who seems to be the only one in town willing to keep an open mind. Through this romance, we get to know Luna: how she interacts with the world, how she copes with loneliness, her interests, likes, and dislikes.

It doesn't take much to figure out how Henri and Luna's love story will end, and in the last few minutes, it becomes apparent that it was all a prologue. We're getting a great variety of shoujo anime this season, and Champignon Witch is a lovely addition. And hey, if you don't trust me, maybe you'll trust Chica Umino instead – she recommended the manga herself.