“The Witch With One Year to Live”
What They Say:
On Meg’s seventeenth birthday, she learns she only has one year left to live. Her mentor, the Eternal Witch, Faust, explains that she is cursed and the only way to save herself is to grow a seed of life using one thousand tears of joy. Of course, such tears aren’t easy to come by. As Meg begins her quest, she finds herself drawn into the lives of her friends and neighbors in ways she never imagined. By sharing their burdens and using her magic to comfort them, she learns how precious those moments of connection can be, even in the face of death.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
This spring 2025 anime is adapted from the light novel series by Saka with illustrations by Korefuji, which translates as Once Upon a Witch’s Death: The Tale of the One Thousand Tears of Joy. It’s being released in English by Yen Press so fans can continue the journey easily after the season ends. The adaptation has an interesting team behind it with Atsuhi Nigorikawa directing it from the scripts supervised by Keiichiro Ochi. Nigorikawa handled the Anime de Training series that I stupidly enjoyed but also handled things as varied as Gantz and Love Tyrant. Ochi has an interesting list of credits from Bakuman to The Demon Girl Next Door but also the recent Go! Go! Losert Ranger! series. EMT Squared is on the animation production and I’ve liked a lot of things they’ve done. This is also one of two shows they’re doing this season so that does create some level of concern for fans of the work, but they’ve had a lot going on the last few years in terms of capacity.
The premise behind this is one of those character-building types of concepts as we’re introduced to a world where magic and technology exist together. It introduces us to Meg, who at seventeen is told by her mentor as a witch, Faust, that she’ll die in a year. It’s part of an old curse for witches that has them basically learning from the world around them. With rapid aging happening upon the birthday, most tend to last less than a month after that and Faust “gifts” her the vision of how it plays out. While Meg looks for all kinds of ways to deal with this, Faust reveals that the only way to do it is to collect a thousand tears of joy. With a bottle given to her, she has to get them from people in order to understand their emotions through it. There’s a little magical mambo jumbo given for it, but Faust helps her set the bottle to help her collect these tears of joy and to ensure that she makes it to the end. Meg’s kind of disbelieving a lot of this and is definitely more jokingly animated than you’d expect for the situation, but she attacks the problem with gusto from the start – which means she doesn’t quite understand it yet.
Unsurprisingly, the episode focuses on her first “case” of getting a tear for the collection and some of it comes from her just interacting with a young girl named Anna. It’s one laced with some tragedy since her mother had died previously and she wonders if Meg’s mentor Faust could bring her back to life, being one of the seven great witches in the world. It delves into the life of this girl and her father in a fairly natural way in a story like this and it helps to draw down some of the chaotic reactions of Meg from early on, making her a bit more normal in a sense. It’s a good moment for her as it goes on, as she reassures the child, which in turn helps her father a lot as well. Naturally, both are tearful with their own kind of joy from the experience and how they rebond with each other because of it and you know that gives Meg what she needs in a delightfully small magical way. And really, considering how she was with Faust and her foray into town, it’s almost like a different character with Meg.
In Summary:
The concept behind this works in a pretty good way and you can see it as a kind of version of Kiki’s Delivery Service to an extent. Even some of Faust and Meg’s home – and Faust in particular – feels very much of that world. Meg’s journey is a standard one and her mixture of spunk and sensitivity will likely work well as it goes on and if it sticks to mostly standalone episodes with the overall storyline for it. You can even see some potential romance mixed in as well. But it’s got a good comfort kind of feeling about it with some decent animation and designs. Meg just rubs me the wrong way to some degree at the start here and it took most of the episode for that to ease enough to give her the benefit of the doubt. The show should please fans overall and people finding it for the first time will find a show that’s easy to get into.
Grade: B
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
