How would you rate episode 4 of
Witch Watch ? Community score: 3.9
The Witch Watch dub is finally out on Netflix and Crunchyroll, and I'm pretty happy with it so far. Between the barrage of hyper-specific pop culture references and his love of puns, Kenta Shinohara's brand of humor is probably about as difficult to translate into English as Gintama. While I was mostly optimistic, it was hard not to be a little worried about how that would turn out. Similar to the Ocean dub of Gintama, it seems like the solution was simply to just leave most of that as is, with any extra punch to the dub script mostly in the form of more swear words. While it might alienate casual viewers a bit more than going for a looser localization, this was probably the right call considering how hard it is to separate Shinohara's sense of humor from this show's identity, and Alex Von David's work on other comedies like K-ON and KONOSUBA makes him a pretty good fit for this one. The dub's comedic timing feels solid, and I'm also happy with Howard Wang and LilyPichu's performances as Morihito and Nico. While the latter is notably squeakier than Rina Kawaguchi's performance, I got used to it pretty quickly, and LilyPichu's Nico is still plenty funny, so it still works for the character. Considering that the jokes are only going to get harder to translate, I'm curious how well the rest of the dub will tackle that, but for the time being, it seems like an easy recommendation if you wanna watch this show in English.
Moving on to this week's episode, we get our full introduction to Nico's newest familiar, Kanshi, and he's quite a character. Compared to Morihito, who's always a stick in the mud unless you get him talking about vintage fashion, Kanshi is more of a goofball, and considerably more sociable. As such, it doesn't take long for him to start reminiscing with Nico. It's cute seeing how jealous Morihito is over their history, even if he doesn't quite piece that together himself. Since Morihito can't help but be all about business, though, his first instinct is to start interrogating Kanshi and have Nico use her magic to get him to spill the beans on why he's here. Rather than using it directly on him, though, she instead uses it on his umbrella, which suddenly turns into a goofy mascot character and reveals the truth: Kanshi's here because owes a bunch of his friends money and spent all his funds on gacha, so when Nico's mom offered to pay off his debts in exchange for bodyguard duty, he practically leapt at the opportunity. That pretty much tells you all you need to know about exactly how much of a dork this guy is, and any chance he had of coming off as cool is instantly vaporized.
Although Morihito is willing to work with him to protect Nico, Kanshi can't bring himself to get along with him. There is a long, bitter history between ogres and tengus, and this animosity has been passed down for several generations. What's the source of this, you might ask? It's because the tengus are jealous of how popular ogres are in folktales and pop culture, with Kanshi's dad going so far as to wonder why Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba couldn't have been called Tengu Slayer instead (and while I'm not one to mock taste, I have to call him out on his favorite character being Hantengu since he's a nothing villain, and the Swordsmith Village arc is easily one of the weakest stretches of Demon Slayer). For as comically petty as this all is, what makes it even better is how much Morihito reacts to both this history lesson and Kanshi's presence with almost total indifference, which makes Kanshi even more annoyed with him. Wanting her two guy friends to get along, Nico decides that the easiest way to get to become friends is through a convoluted spell that will cause one of them to become friendlier towards the other if they share a snack, but this ends up working a little too well and causes Morihito to start coming on to Kanshi. Thankfully, rather than making this into a bad gay panic joke, Kanshi is much more weirded out by Morihito's insistence on putting his arm around his shoulder like they are old buddies. When Kanshi tries to escape this, he accidentally ends up sharing some of his snacks with the rest of the neighborhood, who also want to link shoulders, and by the time Nico tracks them down, they have formed one giant chain.
As much silly fun as all of this is, it's not quite enough to get these boys to bury the hatchet. Next, Nico seemingly gets a new outfit from her mother, only for it to have been sent by a malicious magic user who uses it to take her hostage. Despite the high stakes here, the situation feels goofier than it does dire. Partially because we have yet to learn why Nico is being targeted, or what the goal of kidnapping her is, but also because the outfit trying to take her hostage just looks like a discount version of Senketsu from Kill la Kill, and that's something that can be taken but only so seriously (plus its hard not to laugh when Morihito and Kanshi point out how suspicious placed its eyes are on Nico). In the end, the two of them manage to rescue her at the expense of her shirt, and after seeing that Morihito is a stand-up guy, Kanshi decides to try moving past any ancestral grudges in favor of being buddies. While Morihito remains as aloof about all of this as ever, we learn from Nico that since Morihito has always been incredibly self-sufficient, it's led him to avoid much of an interest in other people. This more or less makes Kanshi the first real friend he's had besides Nico, and it makes the ending heartwarming, even having a Yu-Gi-Oh! duel seems like a better way to end a friendship than to start one.
Given that Kanshi can be loud and obnoxious, I could see his presence as a central cast member being divisive. Still, he manages to be just endearing enough to be funny rather than annoying, and I like him a lot. As for as much as the show has gotten out of it so far, there's only so many variations it can do of “Nico casts a spell to impress Morihito, only for it to backfire,” so having a second victim for her magical misfires opens up a lot more windows for good comedy. Speaking of annoyances, if I did have any, they have nothing to do with this week's episode and more to do with its subtitles. When I watched the episode, the subtitles were missing outlines and only appeared on screen as plain white text. Not only did this make some of it harder to read, but some of the text was invisible if there was any white on the screen where they were located. Thanks to that, I missed the full explanation for Nico's aforementioned friendship spell and had to figure out how it worked from the general context. Fortunately, it seems the issue has since been fixed, but it is a pretty bizarre QC error to run into. That aside, I otherwise had a good time with this episode, and now that we've got a new addition to our core ensemble, I'm looking forward to whatever new magical hijinks Kanshi's presence inspires.
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Witch Watch is currently streaming on Crunchyroll on Sundays.
