At Anime Expo 2026, the team behind Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia—executive director Naoko Yamada, Science SARU producer Rie Misumi, and TV Asahi producer Kazuki Endo—appeared at the event to share behind-the-scenes stories after premiering the first two episodes. Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia follows Sitara, a young slave who is taken in by a family of scholars. As she adjusts to her new life and discovers a passion for learning, her world is upended when Genghis Khan’s Mongol Empire takes her captive, setting her on a path of revenge.
Endo began by sharing his motivation for pursuing an anime adaptation of A Witch’s Life in Mongol: “I was just so amazed and impressed by how everything was portrayed in the original source material from the manga. The characters are drawn in such a cute way, but it’s such a serious story with really great drama, and I thought this needs to be adapted into an anime. For this kind of story and artwork, I figured creatively it would be very difficult to adapt, but I knew that Science SARU is just an amazing studio. I really thought I have to take this chance. We have to make this into an anime.”
The team behind the anime adaptation is composed of executive director Naoko Yamada, director Abel Gongora, character designer Kenichi Yoshida, and art director Yuri Kabasawa. Yamada explained that director Gongora’s interest in Heidi, Girl of the Alps overlapped with the similar themes in Jaadugar, making him a good fit for the project. Meanwhile, Misumi pointed to executive Yamada’s deep interest in cultural stories rooted in history, character designer Yoshida’s past work on Gundam Reconguista in G and Extra-Terrestrial Boys & Girls, and art director Kabasawa’s past work on Demon Slayer for inviting them to join the team.
On developing the direction for the project, there wasn’t a major distinction between Yamada and Gongora’s roles. “When we first started the series, I started out with creating these scripts. I also worked on pointing out what are the important aspects of the anime and then passed it onto Abel,” Yamada said. “I’d ask him to please make sure to have these certain details, and he’d add in the visuals and other creative layers to bring it all together. We were able to finish Jaadugar in a very ambiguous way because we did overlap quite a bit.”
The series opens with a striking scene of Sitara running through the streets of Persia, with director Gongora personally handling the storyboard. “This scene is not available in the manga, as it’s an anime-only scene,” Misumi began. “We wanted to bring forward the spectacular aspects of Persia and its fabulous environment. Sitara is only five years old, but she has this courage to run away from the city in order to escape her life as a slave. So while she is running away and trying to gain her freedom, we wanted to portray the beauty of Persia.”
On developing the visual identity of the series, it was important to stay true to the source material. “The character designs were done in a way that made it easier for our animators to draw the movements and bring the characters to life,” Misumi shared. “Director Yamada and Gongora talked very closely about portraying certain things from the source material like the cutesy style of having big hands and a little bit unusual proportions in order to stay true to the character.”
As cute as Sitara is, she suffers one tragedy after another, fueling her desire for revenge. Even so, the series uses a pomegranate as a symbol of hope rooted in her Persian heritage. Misumi explained, “For pomegranates, it’s very symbolic in Persia. It has a very important cultural meaning in terms of her origins. The fruit or the seeds of the pomegranate represent life, prosperity, and family, so we wanted to use that as a symbol for a hopeful future where Sitara can grow and develop as a person.”
Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia is streaming globally on Crunchyroll.
