In Hayao Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service, the plucky title witch no sooner turned thirteen than she left home to make a living in a faraway town. Kiki, though, had it easy compared to Meg Raspberry, the heroine of Once Upon a Witch's Death. On her seventeenth birthday, Meg's guardian-cum-foster parent, who's an awesomely powerful matriarch with the daunting name of Faust, calls the girl into her study. Between sips of tea, Faust calmly announces Meg will die from a magic curse in a year's time.

As Meg points out, this is the worst birthday present ever. At this point, I must give away that her predicament isn't resolved by the season's end, and it's unclear if we'll see it resolved in anime form – there's no confirmed continuation as of this writing. The source light novels (by the author Saka) are being translated into English, as is a manga version, but viewers should be warned the anime ends on something of a cliffhanger, for now at least.

Fundamentally, Meg's challenge is comparable to Kiki's: to find a way to live that's not reliant on the people who've protected and raised her so far. After all, Meg's situation isn't hopeless, technically speaking. Faust explains there's a way Meg can beat the curse, though it seems ludicrously impossible. If Meg can collect a thousand tears of joy from the people she meets over the next year, then she can create a “seed of life” and dodge the fatal deadline. The task seems beyond a girl averse to being serious or committed – Meg is happier teasing her friends and magic “familiar” animals. Still, if she can grow beyond that, then now's the time..

Like its heroine, Once Upon a Witch's Death doesn't seem to take itself very seriously at first. Despite Meg's predicament, the tone is aggressively jokey and upbeat. The girl may occasionally mourn her bad luck, but she's easily distracted, by her friends, food or – most admirably– by the problems of others. In episode one, she meets a father and his young daughter, who are trying to cope with their recent bereavement. From a series of sharp observations, Meg finds she can help them, leading to a beautiful feat of witchery in a graveyard that startles Meg herself – “Did I really do all this?” When she leaves, it's with two freshly shed tears in a bottle, and her survival seems a bit more plausible.

It's a good mini-story, touching and cathartic, even with characters who we've only known for a few scenes. (The little girl gets the heartbreak line, asking Meg, “I don't have to hold it in anymore?”) It's placed in a fantasy England not so far from The Ancient Magus' Bride. The handsome Tudor-style timbered houses suggest somewhere like Stratford, though the town is given the more fantastical name of Lapis. Maybe it's twinned with Koriko in Kiki's Delivery Service.

The show's main asset is the energy of Meg herself. Boisterously voiced in Japanese by Yoshino Aoyama, the “Bocchi” of Bocchi the Rock!, Meg is a gregarious, amusingly exasperating force of nature, with little embarrassment or filter. Pretty much all her friends, old or new, are female, and much of the time they're just trying to hold Meg in check. She has a particular thing for talking to them as if she's a creepy older man, begging them to marry her, to belong to her, and the like.

It's not the height of wit, and some viewers may take it as mock-queerbaiting on the show's part. Such schtick's certainly not enough to carry the series. After the touching first episode, the next few installments are less engaging, as the show descends towards bland slice-of-life fare which fails the “three episode” test. The most startling development has Meg realizing that, deep down, she's already close to giving up and resigning herself to die. The show could have done a lot with that, but it doesn't have anything interesting to say on the subject. To invoke Kiki once more, Miyazaki's film was more eloquent on the loss of motivation and hope, without giving its protagonist a death sentence.

And yet Once Upon a Witch's Death grows on you. I was turned round in episode five, which sees Meg spreading joy to her town against a backdrop of bursting fireworks, before running into trouble when the huge owl she's on runs out of juice. From there, the episodes get more interesting and involving – there's a lovely one-off story when Meg is barred from magic after she's got too full of herself, and must relearn what it means to help others. The episode is cheesily funny in places, but it culminates in uplift after Meg endures an exhausting climb, physical and spiritual.

From there the stakes are higher, with Meg facing truly dangerous situations. She may only have a year, but she mightn't make it even that far if she's careless. One girl transforms into a toothy Lovecraft monster. Later, the show's not coy about showing what happens to animals in medical research. The last episode has flashback images of carnage and a destroyed city which feel uncomfortably close to the current news.

There's also an episode when Meg realizes a normal seeming family in her town hides a diabolical secret, involving human sacrifice. Given the series is set in a broadly realistic modern world, the story might feel queasy to anyone who's old enough to remember the “Satanic panics” of the 1980s, the QAnon conspiracies of their day – although it seems these panics never spread to Japan.

There's also the stirrings of an arc plot, with more world-building, more clues as to why Meg has been cursed, and more perils (including one crisis with obvious resonances for a Japanese audience). The last episode reveals more of the backstory, but far from all of it, leaving many ways that Meg's world may be upended in the story to come, whether it's animated or not.

None of the other main characters are especially original, but they make decent foils for the ebullient Meg. There's Sophie, a red-eyed Rei-type with a lonely past who Meg's determined to make smile; Inori, a majestically wise teacher whose authority is undercut by an unfortunate hygiene problem; plus there's an irritating kid who Meg runs into at a magic event who, inevitably, transpires to be more than she seems. Then there's the mother figure grounding Meg, the naturally authoritative Faust, with a twinkle under her severity. She's voiced in Japanese by Yoshiko Sakakibara, one of anime's great commanders in decades past, as Kushana in Nausicaä and Shinobu in Patlabor.

EMT Squared's presentation isn't as inspired as the same studio's 2024 series, Train to the End of the World. The British setting, however, is highly attractive, down to the wooden solidity of Faust's and Meg's timbered home. Later we enjoy a visit to Venice in all but name, though a supposedly magical realm in one episode is disappointingly nondescript. There are also strong individual moments, from the widowed dad's expressions in part one as his feelings overcome him, to Meg's flight amid fireworks in part five, to a final embrace in the closing moments.