Which comes as a surprise to the inhabitants of the Witch Realm, who think magic is about consolidating power, particularly over the fairies whose bodies provide necessary magical components for their spells. But within minutes of Arusu's arrival into their world, her interference has freed their laboriously captured stock of all 100 fairy types, leaving them dangerously low on magical supplies. Arusu and the apprentice witches who found her—good-hearted Eva and dour, focused Sheila—are ordered to retrieve all 100 fairy types.

It sounds like the setup for a laboriously episodic gotta-catch-'em-all series like Pokémon, InuYasha or even Lilo and Stitch: The Series. But Tweeny Witches rapidly heads off in many other directions. Arusu can do magic without incantations or fairy pieces, which she accepts as proof that magic comes from the heart; then she loses her father's book and her ability to work spells and has to start learning things the hard way. The witches' high council wants that lost book, which was once their guide to "true witchcraft." The same council puts some of the fairy-retrieval work in the hands of three psychopathic renegades, who begin bringing them back dead or mutilated, saying, "All we need are the tails and nails and stuff like that. Who cares about the rest?" The younger witches start rebelling as it becomes clear that the council is running out of fairy components. Arusu interferes with all fairy-recapturing attempts, in the name of freedom. And then the witches' rivals, the warlocks, get involved.

A weirder Alice in Wonderland

Early on, Tweeny Witches launches a fascinating world where witches and warlocks face off amid elaborate social rules and a strange political structure. The animation supports the world's depth: Like a Ralph Bakshi film, it layers blobby characters over supremely deep, complicated, video-game-like backdrops, from a disintegrating stilt-house over a lake to a dark forest full of weirdo creatures that won't make most Western viewers think of "fairies." Studio 4°C gives Tweeny Witches a visual stamp similar to that of its recent feature Tekkon Kinkreet: The characters often look scrawled and sloppy, with perspective distortions that suggest children's drawings. But ambitious camera movement sends viewers diving through knobbly 3-D landscapes that clearly absorbed all the time and attention saved on the characters.

The problem is, the storytelling doesn't do the world justice. The chronology jumps around wildly, with no sense of transition between time periods, so viewers will have to scramble to figure out whether they're in the past, present or future. The framing puts key moments offscreen, which is similarly confusing; it also focuses sometimes on random details instead of on whoever's talking. The characters argue loudly and endlessly about the same few points—fairy rights and the purpose of magic—while around them events charge forward randomly, leaving plot threads behind willy-nilly. The overall effect is spastic and distracted, and the flailing, hyper Arusu produces a similar effect.

It's possible that all this is an attempt to channel the madcap tone of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, an obvious influence exposed in the title and the protagonist's name. And Tweeny Witches does have some of that book's dreamlike, dissociative qualities, alongside some familiar anime tropes (magical girls, the savior from another world, the long list of lost items to round up) and some events that seem to deliberately parody anime. Added all together, the project is hit-and-miss, and never very satisfying on a story level. But the hits, at least, tend to come from a more ambitious and creative place than a lot of anime, and while the series isn't very consistent, it's a good cure for boredom with run-of-the-mill fare.