Name: Witch on the Holy Night
Genre: Animation, Fantasy, Drama
Released: 2026-11-20T00:00:00+00:00
Cast: Haruka Tomatsu, Kana Hanazawa, Yusuke Kobayashi

The image at the top of this page is the whole pitch. Two girls in dark coats stand in a field of pale flowers under a sky crowded with stars, one of them turning to look back over her shoulder, the blooms washed the same cold blue as the sky. It is promotional art for Witch on the Holy Night, ufotable’s animated feature of Kinoko Nasu’s TYPE-MOON visual novel, and it carries no explosion, no sword, no monster. Its subject is night itself. The title promises it, and so does the theme song, which supercell called “Yoru to Ao”, night and blue.

The story belongs to the last years of the Showa era, in Misaki, a provincial town where an old mansion is said to house a witch. It does. Aoko Aozaki, the student council president at the local high school, spends her nights there training as an apprentice magician under her housemate, Alice Kuonji. Then a transfer student from the mountains, Soujuurou Shizuki, sees something he should not have seen, and the two witches end up sharing the house with a boy who does not belong in their secret.

The casting says this is meant as continuity, not reinvention. Haruka Tomatsu voices Aoko, Kana Hanazawa voices Alice and Yusuke Kobayashi voices Soujuurou, the same three performers who play them in the game, which tells a fanbase that has lived with these voices that the film will not ask it to learn new ones. The look follows the same logic. Moe Tsuzuki adapts the original character designs by Hirokazu Koyama, and Koyama himself drew a new character visual for the release campaign.

A studio whose signature is light

The studio’s history with TYPE-MOON runs through the films of Nasu’s The Garden of Sinners, Fate/Zero and the Heaven’s Feel trilogy before Demon Slayer made the studio a box-office name worldwide. What audiences tend to remember from that work is luminance: glowing blades and burning spell circles. The credits here point straight at that department. Masaru Takeuchi directs, with ufotable president Hikaru Kondo as chief director, and Yuichi Terao is credited as both director of photography and finishing direction supervisor, the role that at ufotable governs compositing, where much of the studio’s glow is made. One of the stills released for the film shows Aoko mid-spell inside rings of electric blue light, the kind of frame the studio has built its name on.

The sound comes from the source as well. Hideyuki Fukasawa, who composed the game’s music, scores the film. The theme is written, composed and arranged by supercell’s ryo and sung by Nagi Yanagi, the same pairing behind the game’s ending theme. The title of the song reads as a quiet joke for anyone who knows the characters: the “ao” in it is the blue in Aoko’s name.

What two trailers cannot answer

The marketing has been confident about mood and silent about shape. Two weeks before opening, the running time has not been published in Japanese listings or on TMDB, and nothing released so far explains how a visual novel that takes many hours to read, much of it talk between three people in one house, becomes a single feature. The studio’s earlier TYPE-MOON films answered that problem by splitting a story across several instalments. Here there is one film, and the only action still among its promotional images is a spell being cast, a smaller share of the novel than its conversations. The studio’s polish is not in question. Whether the patience of the source survives the cut is, and no one outside the production has seen enough to say.

There is also a wait built into the release. Outside Japan, Crunchyroll and Sony Pictures Entertainment hold the film for two months or more, so Japanese audiences will set the conversation, and spread the twists, long before most of the world can buy a ticket.

The production credits ufotable, TYPE-MOON and Aniplex, with Toho and Aniplex distributing in Japan. The film is based on the visual novel TYPE-MOON released in Japan in 2012; its English version arrived worldwide in December 2022 and on Steam the following year, and Crunchyroll has announced a mobile edition for its Game Vault service in 2027. Abroad, the film will play in Japanese with subtitles and in an English dub.

Aoko Aozaki casts a spell in a still from ufotable film Witch on the Holy Night (2026) — Aoko Aozaki in *Witch on the Holy Night* (2026)

Witch on the Holy Night opens in Japan on November 20, 2026, in IMAX from the first day; supercell’s theme goes on digital sale on November 21. Crunchyroll and Sony open the film in the United States and Canada on January 29, 2027, the same day as the United Kingdom, Ireland and India.

The flowers in that promotional image glow under starlight, and nobody in it is fighting. Whether the film is willing to be that still is the one thing no trailer can show.