Witch on the Holy Night Trailer Sets Up a January Debut

A new trailer for Witch on the Holy Night arrived on Tuesday, October 27, giving fans in North America their fullest look so far at ufotable's film version of the TYPE-MOON story. Animation Magazine reported that the trailer features the theme song Yoru to Ao by supercell, and it leans on snowy streets, a hilltop mansion, and short bursts of magecraft rather than a long plot summary. The footage centers on Aoko Aozaki, Alice Kuonji, and Soujyuro Shizuki, the three young people at the heart of the story. An earlier Japanese trailer arrived on September 30 and ran about ninety seconds, previewing the song alongside footage of the three leads.

Crunchyroll and Sony Pictures Entertainment will release Witch on the Holy Night in theaters in the United States and Canada on January 29, 2027, screening it in Japanese with English subtitles and with an English dub. The worldwide rollout starts earlier in other regions, with screenings opening January 21 in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, January 28 across Mexico, Brazil, Australia, and much of Europe, and February 5 in Spain and Kazakhstan. Anime News Network reported the full country-by-country calendar when Crunchyroll announced the dates.

A late-1980s story of apprenticeship

Witch on the Holy Night is set in the late 1980s and follows Aoko Aozaki, one of two sister heirs to a long family line of modern mages. Aoko has little interest in magic at first, but she is declared the heir to the family art and begins an uneasy apprenticeship under Alice Kuonji, a young witch living in a lonely manor on a hill. Aoko also serves as her school's student council president, which leaves her splitting her days between ordinary school duties and lessons in the arcane.

The cast of Witch on the Holy Night brings back familiar voices for the three leads, with Haruka Tomatsu as Aoko, Kana Hanazawa as Alice, and Yusuke Kobayashi as Soujyuro, the transfer student who is unfamiliar with much of the modern world. The other pressure on Aoko comes from her older sister Toko, who believes her birthright was denied and works against the arrangement. That family tension runs alongside the quieter household scenes in the trailer, where Aoko and Alice learn to live under the same roof.

A long road from page to screen

The story began as one of the first collaborations between writer Kinoko Nasu and artist Takashi Takeuchi in the mid-1990s, before the pair founded TYPE-MOON. Nasu and Takeuchi showed the early draft only to friends and did not officially release it, and TYPE-MOON eventually developed it into a visual novel with graphics by Hirokazu Koyama that shipped in April 2012. Aniplex later brought the game to PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch in the West in December 2022, and the game arrived on Steam in December 2023.

The theme song carries its own bit of history. Yoru to Ao was written, composed, and arranged by ryo, with Nagi Yanagi on lead vocals, and it marks Yanagi's first new supercell song in about fifteen years. Supercell previously performed the ending theme for the original Witch on the Holy Night game, and ryo said the group would have stayed inactive without this project. That connection gives the trailer a sense of continuity with the game that longtime fans know well, and it ties the film version of Witch on the Holy Night directly to the material that started it all.

ufotable's involvement is part of the draw as well, since the studio animated Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle and has a long run of TYPE-MOON collaborations behind it, including the Fate series and the Garden of Sinners. According to our earlier reporting, this film arrives in a busy stretch for anime on the big screen: Ghost in the Shell is returning with Science SARU, and a finale film will close out Kaiju in 2027.

The film opens in Japan on November 20, and the smartphone version of the original visual novel launches the same day. For North American audiences, the wait for Witch on the Holy Night runs a little longer, until the January 29 opening in the United States and Canada.