![]() ![]() While the soundtrack ordinarily plays some more generic piano lines with the Ooarai girls off the field, once the tanks show up everything switches to symphony band fight songs and national rallying cries. Gloriana girls are the tea-drinking Brits who act high class and elegant even while sitting in the cramped interior of a tank, while the Russians of Pravda Girls High School are hardened winter veterans led by the adorable Katyusha, a pint-sized commander with a bigger superiority complex than even the American team (who incidentally come off a lot better than one might expect for a Japanese caricaturization). Each one is themed around a different country, both in their tank models and in their ridiculous characters. The other schools too are a key part of the comedy. Clever dialogue between all these groups both in and off of the battlefield, along with an acute awareness of the more unconscious aspects of these personalities (the freshmen, for example, are the most excitable and impressionable of the lot, even if they abandon everything they’ve learned at the drop of a hat) make these characters relatable even though they don’t act like anyone we’ve ever actually met. But also we recognize that the Volleyball club is the group of obsessive athletes who use ridiculous sports metaphors, or the morals committee as the three identical short girls with matching black hair who get on everyone’s case about coming in on time. Pretty soon we come to recognize the student council’s Turtle team as the small nuisance machine that causes disarray, or the history buffs’ Hippo team as the big guns of the group. Each of the tanks in the Ooarai lineup are led by different groups such as the engineers, the nerds, the freshmen, or the student council itself, and with each tank being of a different size and with different specs these groups manifest their personality through their tank and their style of fighting in spades. Director Mizushima Tsutomu and writer Yoshida Reiko have a playful sense of humor, with Miho’s more objective leadership and commands contrasting against the ridiculous personalities of her whole crew. Not that the slice of life is bad by any stretch. Make no mistake: tank battles are far and away the central focus of Girls und Panzer, and slice of life is just the cherry on top. Gloriana high school team, and then the annual high school tank fighting tournament. Soon they are in a full-on mock battle against the famed St. If the first episode is a more meandering setup of all these facts as well as an introduction to all her classmates who will soon follow her into battle, then the next few waste no time in getting right into the action, with the whole team learning the ropes in a few weeks flat. Well, until she chooses Ooarai, the one school that doesn’t have it as an elective, only for the absurdly powerful student council to bring it back and pressure her into participating and even leading their team. The protagonist Nishizumi Miho is set up to have the mental quandary of reconciling her strict tank fighting family values of victory at all costs with a split second decision she once made to save a crew drowning in their tanks mid-tournament, losing the match as a result and leaving the school and tank fighting for good. There is a story, but it ultimately boils down to a shell on which to structure tank fight after tank fight. I never thought this genre could produce something so subversive, and I never thought it could produce something so unabashedly fun. They are able tank fighters and tacticians who happen to be cute girls, with little to no fanservice and plenty of skill to back up their image. And for a show about “cute girls doing cute things,” not only is the “cute thing” far out of left field, but the “cute girls” themselves are rarely important as such. In a world where the grit, muscle, and tactical skill of tank fighting is more feminine than ikebana, where the safety concerns around firing tank shells at one another can be half dismissed by hand-wavy armor and shell technology and half dismissed because no one cares, it’s not long into the first few practice skirmishes we see that the image of high school tank fighting as an elective seems natural, to the point where we might even be jealous our school didn’t have their own Panzer armada. Girls und Panzer goes beyond a story of high school girls driving tanks it sets up tanks and high school girls as inseparable. I never thought the “cute girls doing cute things” genre could be so subversive. ![]()
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