Rating: 85/100
Man, the summer of 2026 has been a banger year for anime, probably one of the best seasons of it in years. Between a slew of original anime, stellar adaptations of existing manga and novels, and just the sheer variety of different genres and demographics being explored, I honestly can't think of any anime season that's been this stacked since...I think sometime in 2011. I know one of the most anticipated was a little unassuming josei adaptation called Jaadugar: A Witch In Mongolia, directed by Naoko Yamada and animated by Science Saru. I have only vague knowledge of the manga it's based on, A Witch's Life In Mongol by Tomato Soup, but even without that, I have a question for you: What anime, or even any storytelling medium at all, can you think of that's set in the Mongol Empire as ruled by Genghis Khan? That alone set Jaadugar apart from all its contemporaries, as the Middle East is very rarely a setting explored by most storytelling mediums, much less in a respectful manner, and based on stories and interviews I've read about Naoko Yamada and her team actually traveling to the Middle East to do research on its culture and history, Jaadugar has set a pretty high bar on how to do it. I wholeheartedly agree, though saying Jaadugar is only good because of how well it depicts its setting and how well-researched it is is still doing it a bit of a disservice, as it has far more to offer than just being a well-animated history lesson.
In the early 13th century, knowledge and wisdom are as valuable as riches and gold. In the city of Tus in Persia, a young girl, Sitara, is sold as a slave to a family of scholars. Although she initially tried to run away, they taught her the importance of knowledge, and she ended up working and studying in their home. After the heir to the family leaves for Nishapur to further his studies, the Mongols invaded Tus. Everyone Sitara knew and grew to care for was slaughtered, and in the ensuing chaos, she was captured by Tolui's army. After being taken to Mongolia, she takes on the name Fatima and begins to plot her revenge on the Mongols. In doing so, she finds herself in the employ of Toregene, the sixth wife of new Mongol emperor Ogedei, who absolutely hates him because of what he did to her tribe. They bond over their shared suffering and decide to work together to bring the Mongol empire to its knees, by any means necessary.
Now, in order to fully explain my feelings on Jaadugar and the things I feel it both succeeded and struggled with, I have to compare it to another anime Yamada-san and Science Saru worked on, The Heike Story, because if you really think about it, both stories are fairly similar in premise, focusing on young girls who lost their families in turbulent times and are drawn into the ensuing political disputes and fallout, even if their approaches are significantly different. Obviously, the setting is the big standout here, not just from how its animated and depicted, but how it forms the basis of the entire plot. Backgrounds are depicted with impressionist, painterly splendor, every frame being a work of art in and of itself, and the finer details like clothing, tapestries, book covers, tent thresholds, and Islamic rituals are recreated and treated with reverence, bringing Jaadugar's world to life. True to Science Saru's ethos, realism doesn't have to mean drab, colorless, or devoid of wonder, with the aforementioned rituals, afterlife visions, and philosophical framing being elevated with picturesque, storybook-like scenes that are a feast for the eyes and imagination. Of course, Yamada-san's favored directorial techniques are used to great effect here, and I honestly can't say anything else about them that hasn't been said by others already, other than that she's really managed to refine them to a fine point since her first outings, and her years of experience really show here.
But it's not enough to make a place look pretty, but to show what life is like on said setting and truly make it feel lived in. Yamada-san and the team at Science Saru spared absolutely no effort. They went all out in studying Persian and Mongol history and culture of 800 years ago in order to depict it as faithfully and respectfully as possible, both the good and bad aspects of it, and they didn't waste a single detail or take anything for granted. Everything, from how the entrances to the Mongol tents always face south, to the differing views and methods on how Muslims and Mongols slaughter animals for food is similarly treated with reverence for their respective cultures, religions, and ideologies. Being historical fiction, Yamada-san knew that the series' setting was tantamount to everything, recognizing the value in depicting it as is, with all of both its good parts and bad parts (Depictions and views on slavery included, which I'm well aware is a contentious topic nowadays thanks to all the bad isekai light novels using it so flippantly), as doing otherwise and trying to sanitize or water it down for the sake of making it palatable for a modern audience would not only be disingenuous, but no better than whitewashing history. Granted, I'm not Muslim myself, so I can't exactly comment on how accurate Jaadugar's depiction of Islamic culture is from that standpoint, and it wouldn't be my place to do so anyway, but again, the fact that Yamada-san and the people at Science Saru went to visit Persia and put in the effort to immerse themselves into the culture to study how to depict it here tells you that they wanted to do this right.
Jaadugar already set the bar pretty high in its depictions of Islamic and Mongol culture, but the series has way more to offer than just that. Much like Heike Story before it, Jaadugar boasts a large cast of characters with clashing ideologies, agendas, cultures, and religions, all with their own different reasons for making the choices they make, and their motives are never black-and-white. Because Heike Story was made to tell a decades-long epic in just eleven episodes, it had to speed run through important plotlines and character beats, never being allowed time to truly let them breathe and allow important emotional moments to leave an impact. With Jaadugar being an ongoing manga, Science Saru learned from their past mistakes with Heike Story and only made sure to adapt the story up to a certain point, so while the pacing still moves rather briskly and does have several time skips to keep track of, it's able to juggle its characters, pacing, and ongoing narrative much better, so it never feels like you missed something important if you looked away from the TV for a fraction of a second. Characters feel much more fleshed out, it's easier to actually keep track of what's going on and who's who, important moments are actually treated with the appropriate level of weight and gravitas in ways that actually stick, and it feels nowhere near as rushed or compressed as Heike Story did. Sitara is also more proactive and entrenched in the story's narrative than Biwa was in Heike Story, and the show sells her growth from a distraught girl who lost everything to a woman trying hard to navigate a system that she's trapped in, while still managing to keep her from being completely infallible.
If this were any regular story, heroes and villains would be much more clear-cut, but Jaadugar isn't interested in your typical hero defeats the villains story. Actually, Jaadugar has my respect for one particular aspect it does amazingly well: Writing and humanizing its villains. Yes, there's no denying that the Mongols were colonizers who razed whole cities to rubble and committed genocide against different tribes and races in the name of expanding its empire, but Jaadugar is smart enough to not just reduce them to just generic evil Saturday morning cartoon villains. Part of this is because Jaadugar explains the logistics behind how forming an empire the way they do actually works, like establishing trade routes, showing them preparing for inclement weather before a battle, how characters who are experienced hunters use hunting methodology to entrap a whole city and kill everyone in it, not just through mass carnage but through food deprivation and isolation. The series recognizes that the Mongols destroyed everything Sitara and Toregene loved and cared for, but it goes out of its way to humanize characters like Tolui, Ogedei, Sorgaghtani, and Boraqchin, and remind us that these people are human, who love their families, care for each other, and have dreams they want to fulfill, and aren't just cackling supervillains who set everything aflame just for funsies, even if they're either ignorant of what's going on or believe that their atrocities can be forgiven when they make the empire into what they want it to be. The Mongols are smart people who think they're doing the ones whose lives they've ruined a service, and isn't that more compelling than just "Muahaha, I'm going to destroy the world because I'm evil!"?
For all that I praise Jaadugar though, there are some things it does struggle with. While it is better about how it uses its time skips compared to Heike Story, they do still happen rather frequently, and if you're not paying attention, it'll be hard to keep track of how much time has passed and how old the characters are. Sitara starts off as a child, and ends this season as a young adult, but I lost track of how old she's supposed to be after the first three time skips. Also, despite so much time passing, it never looks like the characters' appearances change all that much, with only subtle indications showing that time has passed, like in Sitara's case, how tall she's gotten or the shape of her eyes. It's better than her still looking like a kid even after 20 or so years have passed. There's also one bit in the final episode, I found, that just makes no sense to me, where a character insists on telling Sitara what Ogedei is telling her (While Ogedei is literally right there and right in front of her) when he has no reason to do so beyond "Don't talk to a commoner, my lord!" I did find out that this is because the anime left out an instance of there being a language barrier between Sitara and Ogedei, which is weird because they were totally fine with showing Tolui and other characters speaking Mongolian in the first three episodes. Also, this is a minor thing, but does anyone else think the bit in the opening where Sitara opens her eyes and they just pop out into the camera before the titlecard is a bit of a jump scare? Because it kinda freaks me out whenever I watch it.
Jaadugar as an anime does have another significant flaw holding it back: Due to its nature of being a manga adaptation limited to only having 12 episodes to tell its story, similarly to Witch Hat Atelier and Skip & Loafer as of right now, it's only able to cover the beginning of the series, and therefore, isn't truly finished. The first season only offers a taste of the story to come, so the meat of Sitara and Toregene's quest has only just gotten under way. There's currently no information on whether it'll get a second season, and I have heard that the manga isn't too far along and is on hiatus for unspecified reasons. But even season one, as unfinished as it feels, is a pretty damn fantastic show that absolutely knows what it is and stands far above so much of what's churned out these days, reminding me of why I love the medium of anime so much. Jaadugar as a story that absolutely needed to be told by people who not only knew what they were doing, but were willing to put in the effort to treat it with the respect it deserves and do their due diligence, which is way more than I can say about...other stuff I really like. Looking at you, Studio DEEN and your upcoming anime adaptation of From Far Away.
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