Luna is a witch who lives deep in the 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 girl, who's never known the warmth of another person.

It's a persistent myth that fairytales are always happy. As I covered in my review of The Grimm Variations, we can mostly blame the Grimm Brothers for that, as much as Walt Disney may have continued and popularized their sanitizing work. But many fairytales are dark, sad and even outright upsetting. They're warnings and explanations. Stay out of the woods, or the witch will get you. Stay on the path, or the wolf will eat you. Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true in ways you never wanted.

Although Higuchi Tachibana isn't retelling any specific fairytale, Champignon Witch owes a lot to fairytale canon. Luna, the titular witch, seems to carry the curse of the Unkind Girl from Diamonds and Toads. In that rather obscure story, two girls are either blessed or cursed based on their kindness, with the unkind girl ending up damned to have frogs and venomous snakes leap from her mouth every time she opens it. Luna may not bear that burden, but wherever she walks, poisonous mushrooms grow, and anyone who touches her skin ends up sick. In both the ending theme and the second episode, she wears a red hooded cloak, evoking a certain other fairytale girl punished for perceived transgressions, Red Riding Hood. And across all three of these first episodes, Luna behaves in a way that can be seen as selfish--first she endangers Henri's life by continually drawing soul portraits of him, and then the entire world by refusing to relinquish the boy she found floating in the river.

It's not hard to see why she'd do these things. Luna is a profoundly lonely young woman who can't really interact with anybody human because of the danger to them, and she spends most of her time with Merino and Minos, her animal companions. If she's lucky, Claude, the Bird Witch's nearly human crow familiar, comes to visit, but it looks like that doesn't happen often. When she first draws Henri after seeing him in town, his joy at finding his soul able to meet and touch her is a magical experience in many ways. When she has to give him up for his own good, it's heart-shattering. So when the boy appears in the river, dying, it looks to Luna like a second chance.

And then there's the fact that when the other dark witches come to take her to task for her actions, the Water Witch reveals that the boy is cursed, just like her. According to Claude, the seeds of the world's destruction will grow in the boy. It seems likely that Luna's powers came from her cursed status. She can still destroy people, but no longer the world, by which logic it seems likely that the boy can also be defanged. Maybe the other witches just aren't willing to risk it--they don't seem to know about Luna's "master", a large mushroom god of some sort. But maybe if Luna can convince them, she can help this boy.

While these episodes are filled with a lot of static shots, I think it works. 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 2. She also wears multiple outfits, which is pretty unusual for an anime protagonists. Many of the stills have the vibe 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 the limited animation.

You can immediately tell from the character designs that this is from the creator of Gakuen Alice. Higuchi Tachibana has a gift for bittersweetness mixed with cuteness, and that's definitely on display here. It's interesting to think that there's no Mikan to balance out the darker elements this time. Henri comes close, but he's part of the sadness. Luna's got her animal friends and a few othersy, but she's otherwise on her own. At least, she's alone at first. Maybe it's not that a Mikan character doesn't exist so much as that one hasn't come in yet.

The first three episodes really feel like the prologue to the rest of the series, something I'll be able to better assess as the story unfolds. But there's definitely an underlying sorrow to this. There's no guarantee that this will have a happy ending, but it should be an interesting path to follow nonetheless.