What's going on
Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia is a TV anime that started airing in Japan in July 2026. It's based on Tomato Soup's acclaimed manga A Witch's Life in Mongol, and follows Sitara, a former slave girl in the 13th-century Mongol Empire who uses her wits to shake the empire from the inside. It's made by Science SARU, the studio behind DAN DA DAN and The Heike Story.
The show's ending sequence has a soft, bleeding watercolor look. Most viewers assumed it was a digital effect. Japanese TV anime switched to computer coloring around the turn of the century, and hand-painting animation frames is now almost unheard of. Then the studio shared a making-of video from Kiiro Aose, the artist behind the ending, showing that every single frame had been painted by hand in transparent watercolor.
Animation needs a lot of drawings for even a few seconds of movement, so viewers were stunned by how much work that meant. With AI-generated images a constant topic of debate, a few people also pointed out what the video says about handmade work.
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My take
Comments loosely translated for tone. Reactions collected from Togetter and X threads.
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ED making-of video is out! 𓇠𓇠𓇠 The artist behind our ending animation sent us a watercolor making-of video!
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Here’s the making-of for the Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia ED animation🎨
I finished it one sheet at a time in transparent watercolor.
The full-length version is in the quoted post🎥
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I mean, I’d been thinking “wow, that looks pretty…” but hand-finished watercolor?! Of all things!
Science SARU, there’s no measuring how unique you are. Your ideas and execution are true craftsmanship. You’re the pride of Japanese animation.
It’s such a gorgeous watercolor animation, so is it hand-painted…?? No, surely it’s digital these days…?? Impressive either way..
That’s what I was thinking, but it really is handwork.. No flicker, a flowing painted texture, delicate colors. Divine skill..
Seeing handwork like this makes me love the show even more, and makes me go “I want to see the actual paintings from the making-of!”
And then I’d go to an original art exhibition and grin at the knife marks from cutting the masking and the fuzzed-up paper on top (Masking is tape or film laid over parts of the paper so the paint doesn’t go where it shouldn’t.)