A Chinese animation left unfinished after running out of money halfway — sold overseas to recoup costs, yet it became a "phantom masterpiece"?

This article is republished with permission from "动画学术趴" (Anime Academic Party)

"For both the protagonist and its creators, this is a story of walking toward the dawn."

When the farming-simulation web novel Release That Witch was completed in 2019, no one expected that this work, whose anime adaptation was announced early on, would keep people waiting for 7 years.

As the original novel concluded, every appearance of the Release That Witch anime was mostly accompanied by worrisome rumors like "production changes" and "the studio demanding a redo." Even that clamor, mixed with anxiety, didn't last long. After the last trailer was released in 2022, the anime fell into complete silence, as if its adaptation had never been announced at all.

It wasn't until this April that domestic fans discovered this anime, which they had already written off as "cancelled," had quietly finished airing its first season on the overseas platform Crunchyroll, scoring 4.8 on that platform (out of 5.0) and 8.6 on IMDb, becoming a "high-quality Chinese anime."

Until then, most Chinese audiences hadn't even seen it.

Few people expected the Release That Witch anime to be so popular overseas.

One important reason is that the anime was originally made for domestic audiences, and most overseas viewers watched the version with Chinese voice acting. For foreigners unaccustomed to reading subtitles, this was undoubtedly a natural barrier.

Combined with a lack of early promotion, the anime remained lukewarm after the first two episodes aired, and only as the plot reached its midpoint did it slowly gain undeniable discussion in overseas communities.

More importantly, although Crunchyroll bought the overseas streaming rights, the 8 episodes it acquired were only a half-finished product — the reason the anime was silent for several years is indeed that it was cancelled, leaving only the current 8 episodes as its "legacy." As a result, the anime's final episode ends at a plot point with no beginning or end.

From what overseas viewers say, it's not hard to see why they love this anime. Comments like "an anime with a serious tone," "a grand worldview," and "Game of Thrones vibes" show that they've grown tired of the juvenile isekai shows flooding the market, and what they value is precisely the mature plot construction and narrative pacing in Release That Witch.

The original novel Release That Witch was already one of the most successful Chinese web novels to go overseas.

Not only was the novel a regular on Webnovel (Qidian International) rankings during its serialization, with over 140 million cumulative reads, its manhua version also launched on North America's Tapas and Japan's Renta!, among other platforms, having long accumulated a sizable overseas "source-material fanbase."

Instead, as the anime kept airing, it rapidly formed an extremely active community overseas.

Take the Release That Witch subreddit, for example: not only do people discuss the plot, share memes, and chat there, some viewers even follow the livestreams of the anime's director Sun Meng, regularly reposting AI-translated summaries of the streams, and even things like "the director replied to me" get discussed — much like what domestic anime fans do when following Japanese or Western anime series.

Clearly, overseas viewers initially assumed that Release That Witch's abrupt ending was simply because it was still airing. But through various reposted information, they gradually learned the truth: this anime is only a half-finished product — as the director revealed in his livestreams, the anime was originally planned for 24 episodes, then cut to 12 for the first season, and in the end only 8 were finished.

These overseas fans were also more concerned than domestic viewers about why the show was cancelled in the first place.

In the words of director Sun Meng, this is a story where nobody "did anything wrong."

Sun Meng revealed in his own livestream that when Release That Witch was first greenlit, there was something like a "production committee" involving both platform and rights-holder representatives.

At first, the director and the "committee" hit it off. He gave the person in charge 5 different proposals, ranging from the cheapest, fastest-to-produce "standard isekai disposable fare," to a light but not deep isekai kingdom-building story, to an epic anime about "awakening Western barbarian civilization through Eastern thought."

Hearing the last proposal, the other side was visibly excited and quickly settled on it, telling him at the time: "Mr. Sun, if you're willing to take on the challenge of the fifth proposal, we'll give you our full support."

The original novel Release That Witch is, in essence, a story about being transported to another world and building infrastructure there. With modern knowledge and ideas, the male lead develops witches' superpowers into productive forces while resisting the oppression of the feudal Church — leaving plenty of room for adaptation to carry this theme.

So they gave the anime a "Game of Thrones-level" positioning; all the scripts, character designs, and storyboards were set to this tone: slower-burning, more epic, and aimed at older audiences.

It was just that around 2022 to 2023, right after the first 8 episodes of Release That Witch were completed, subsequent production was suddenly halted. The reason was simple: the client no longer wanted "this kind of thing."

Sun Meng mentioned in his livestream that, whether voluntarily or not, that person in charge later left, replaced by a new contact person.

When power changes hands, the requirements change with it.

The new person in charge didn't want to bet on the "legacy" left by his predecessor, and amid a poor industry environment, he certainly didn't want to risk trial and error on a "risky" work. So he gave the production team extensive revision requests, hoping the finished product would become lighter, more juvenile, and more like proven successes such as Soul Land and Battle Through the Heavens.

In one interview, Sun Meng said the person in charge at the time felt that "once you make the anime for older audiences, it's hard to handle operations or commercialization" — in other words, such an anime doesn't make money. He then added: "But in big companies like Yuewen and Tencent, the departments that make money always have more say than the ones that don't."

However, in another livestream, Sun Meng also said he fully understood the client's needs. They themselves are a commercial animation studio — if it could be changed, they'd change it; no one wants to argue with money.

But the 8 finished episodes could only be modified on the basis of the existing footage, which simply couldn't satisfy the new person in charge. In Sun Meng's own words, it wasn't that he didn't want to change it — he just couldn't.

By then, Release That Witch had completed the character designs for all of Season 1's characters, and the storyboards for episode 9 were even drawn — only for everything to be shelved as an 8-episode half-finished product.

In the eyes of the "production committee," this already "wrongly directed" anime was further saddled with an "unfinished" debuff, then written off as a low-quality asset and put in cold storage, awaiting the next chance at revival.

In the end, "going overseas" became the least-bad option. We don't know the details of the process, but according to Sun Meng, even the Crunchyroll platform was something he recommended to Yuewen.

After seven years of twists and turns, this domestic anime with only Chinese voice acting aired overseas first, which led to the enthusiastic overseas reception and a devoted audience.

— and a second revival match that may continue to change the anime's fate.

A month ago, while Release That Witch was still airing on Crunchyroll, a petition demanding a second season appeared on the overseas petition site Change.org.

At first, few people noticed the petition; after more than ten days it had only gathered 1,000 supporters. As the anime's reputation continued to grow, and with episode 8's abrupt ending, more and more overseas viewers learned about the anime's turbulent journey over these 7 years.

What began as a simple petition for more episodes quickly grew to 12,000 signatures of support. This in turn became promotion for the anime.

During this period, the work's overseas popularity kept climbing — high enough that even domestic audiences heard about this "high-quality domestic anime." It even drove up readership of the original novel, which after many years returned to the top of Qidian's fantasy and completed rankings.

Thus, Release That Witch, which had long ago obtained its domestic release license, was finally "imported" by two new platforms, Bilibili and iQIYI — or more precisely, released in an "export-to-domestic-sales" fashion.

The loud calls to revive Release That Witch naturally reached the ears of the IP's rights holder, Yuewen Group.

Before this April, Yuewen's official overseas X account had never posted a single tweet about Release That Witch. Only after the anime's popularity soared did the official account begin promoting the IP's novel, manhua, and numerous anime clips in full force. In one tweet, it was even placed among Yuewen's list of representative works.

Along came the long-awaited second revival match.

On May 1, Yuewen's official X account posted a poll asking "Are you looking forward to a second season of Release That Witch?" Although the account isn't usually very active, within two weeks the tweet drew nearly 3,000 voters, and unsurprisingly produced a 95% approval result.

What began as a grassroots petition, with the official "door now slightly open," the second revival match seemed genuinely likely to be won, driven by overseas viewers.

Meanwhile, because Release That Witch's domestic release lagged behind, it had already been seen by domestic viewers on many platforms in "reuploaded" form. Whether as "watch it all in one go" compilations with commentary, or videos copying the original footage outright, they all posted solid view counts.

With the news of the overseas revival poll, more and more people finally learned about the anime's quality and its winding path to release, which in turn sparked its domestic discussion.

For the rights holder, proactively probing market feedback again clearly meant they had noticed the commercial value behind it.

Both at home and abroad, this anime once regarded as a "non-performing asset" solved the long-criticized "market problem" entirely on its own, through export-turned-domestic-sales.

Notably, when Release That Witch was originally halted, the anime actually had no opening animation.

To launch overseas, Sun Meng and Zhenlei Animation made one final adjustment to the work, including producing an opening animation. With the project's future completely unknown and no extra budget, they could only piece together what they had from the 8 finished episodes, cutting together the current OP — which is precisely a microcosm of the entire Release That Witch anime's fate.

It was born in the cracks of power, endured a winter of neglect, and yet still managed to make the work it wanted with scarce resources. That phrase "on their own" isn't as simple as it sounds.

For both the protagonist and the creators of Release That Witch, this is a story of walking toward daybreak after a long, long night.

​References:

​1. An informal interview — after the Release That Witch anime premiered; author @Greycastle Design Bureau