Crunchyroll put out a new trailer on 10 September and confirmed an American release date for a ufotable film. It is not the one anybody was waiting for. “Witch on the Holy Night” opens in Japanese cinemas on 20 November and reaches the United States and Canada on 29 January 2027, handled by Crunchyroll with Sony Pictures Entertainment. Meanwhile “Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle” part two, the middle chapter of a trilogy whose first instalment came out in Japan in July 2025, still has no date, no window, and not so much as a first look.
That is not a scandal, and it is not ufotable being coy. It is what happens when the most in-demand animation studio in Japan has two enormous projects and only one set of hands. But it is worth saying plainly, because the framing everywhere is “Demon Slayer studio dates its next movie,” and the next movie is the other one. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for the “Witch on the Holy Night” trailer and for where this story sits in the Type-Moon timeline.
The framing everywhere is “Demon Slayer studio dates its next movie,” and the next movie is the other one.”
The trailer runs 69 seconds and it is unusually restrained for an anime sell. It opens on a credit rather than a spectacle: “Original Work, Kinoko Nasu / TYPE-MOON.” Then a town at dusk under a grey sky, a concrete overpass, ordinary Japanese suburbia. Text fades up in a serif face, one line at a time. “In this town.” “In the mansion on the hill.” A conservatory with rain on the glass and ivy coming through, then a long dark corridor. “They say there lived two witches.”
Only then does it start moving. Blue light pours off a figure in a long dress. An aerial shot shows a ring of blue fire drawn around the whole town from above, which anyone who has read the source will recognise as a bounded field going up. The dialogue is four subtitled lines and not one of them names anybody. A girl in profile, lit cold: “it is not too late to turn back.” A second, smaller voice: “will it be okay, I wonder?” Then a pair of eyes in extreme close-up and a flat answer that is the most Nasu thing in the whole cut: “there’s no point in even thinking about it.” Finally a red-lit figure with a weapon says “here I go,” and the thing detonates into the kind of lighting ufotable built its reputation on, a girl suspended inside a rotating magic circle with her arms out and lightning coming off the pavement. Then one more card: “this is the beginning of one young Magician’s story.” Then the title, then “only in theatres, January 29.” No character names, no plot, no explanation. It is selling an atmosphere and a pedigree.
The pedigree is the point. “Witch on the Holy Night” started life as a five hundred page novel Kinoko Nasu wrote and never published. It was announced as a visual novel in 2008, took four years to arrive, and landed in April 2012. A remastered version with full voice acting reached Switch and PlayStation 4 worldwide in December 2022 and Steam a year later, which is the version most Western readers will have played, if they played it at all. Nasu is the writer behind “The Garden of Sinners” and the entire “Fate” franchise, so this is not a side project. It is one of the foundation stones of the Type-Moon universe finally getting animated by the studio that animated most of the rest of it.
Here is the thing worth correcting, because we have seen it reported the wrong way round more than once this week. “Witch on the Holy Night” is not a sequel to “Tsukihime.” It is a prequel, to that and to “The Garden of Sinners” both. It is set in the late 1980s, which makes it the earliest point on the Type-Moon timeline, and it is about Aoko Aozaki learning sorcery from Alice Kuonji in a mansion in Misaki Town while something disturbs the barrier around it and an ordinary boy walks into the middle of it. If the name Aoko Aozaki means nothing to you, this will: she is the woman who later teaches Shiki Tohno to control his Mystic Eyes. You are watching the teacher’s own origin story, years before the student turns up. The ordinary boy has a name too: Sojuro Shizuki.
The voice cast is carrying over rather than starting fresh, which matters more here than it usually would. That 2022 remaster was the version that added full voice acting, and the film keeps those performances: Haruka Tomatsu as Aoko, Kana Hanazawa as Alice, Yusuke Kobayashi as Sojuro. Anyone who played the remaster is going to hear the same people. One oddity worth flagging, though, and we have checked it rather than assumed it: the production committee still has not put out a full creative staff list. A film opening in Japanese cinemas in roughly ten weeks does not have a publicly announced director. That is unusual, and it is the sort of blank that tends to get filled in a month before release rather than left empty on purpose.
Which brings us back to the elephant. “Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle” is a trilogy, and part one opened in Japan on 18 July 2025 and in North America on 12 September 2025. That North American anniversary is this week. Fourteen months on from the Japanese release, ufotable has not announced when part two arrives, shown a frame of it, or given a window. That is a long silence for the biggest thing in anime, and the studio has spent that silence finishing a film about two witches in a house in the eighties.
You can read that two ways and both are reasonable. The generous read is scheduling: ufotable is a small studio by the standards of its output, it hand-finishes work other places would outsource, and “Witch on the Holy Night” has been in production for years. It was always going to come out around now. The less generous read is that a trilogy announced as a trilogy should arrive like one, and that a year of silence on part two while a different film gets a full international rollout tells you where the finishing capacity went. Neither reading requires anybody to be at fault. Both are just what a studio bottleneck looks like from outside.
As for the rollout itself, it is broader than these releases usually get, and it is staggered across nine days. Saudi Arabia and the UAE go first on 21 January 2027. German-speaking Europe follows on the 26th, French-speaking Europe on the 27th, then a large wave on the 28th covering most of Latin America along with Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Australia and New Zealand. The United States and Canada land on the 29th alongside the UK and Ireland, Finland, Poland, Sweden and India. Both subtitled and English-dubbed versions are going out. What is not in the announcement is a streaming date for anywhere. Given that Crunchyroll has both the theatrical rights and the platform, it is a reasonable bet the film turns up there eventually and an unreasonable one to guess when.
What Do You Think? Does animating the earliest story in the Type-Moon timeline make “Witch on the Holy Night” the right entry point for newcomers, or is it only going to land for people who already know who Aoko is? Is a year of silence on “Infinity Castle” part two a fair price for ufotable’s finish quality? And with a January theatrical date and no streaming plan, will you actually go to a cinema for this one?
See you on the next binge!
