Recommended
I'm going to just be going over Girls & Panzer as a whole. I wasn't coming into this series expecting much. I really have not done too much research on this, but if Girls & Panzer was not the first, at the very least, Girls & Panzer was the first iconic and most popular series that brought a CGDCT genre along with some action. In Girls & Panzer's case, it was tanks and high school girls. An unlikely combo, and unexpectedly, this combo actually worked, so well that a lot of series spawned from this idea of combining cute girls and violent things. I'm not goingto go over all of them: they're so many offshoots that I can't even name them all, but series I remember would be: Kantai collection, Princess Principle, Slay the Spyce, Spy Room, etc. There's girls that are ships, girls that fight aliens in airplanes, girls that are spies, like damn, there's no end to series like these.
And I hated all of them. Honestly, it didn't work. There's a dissonance, a huge contrast between the serious nature of something like war or espionage and girls eating cakes for an afternoon tea party. Or for the silly ones, too much fanservice or just outright bad writing.
Girls & Panzer definitely dominates its competition, even over a decade later. That's because it was able to balance the fun nature of the CGDCT genre and the serious tank-fighting genre.
What was the first thing that brought these two together? Ridiculous worldbuilding. Let me introduce Senshado. It normalizes tank fighting as a regular high school sport. When Tanks get hit point blank, the people inside the tank don't die, a white flag indicating surrender pops out instead. With this as its foundation, the meshing of the two things work.
You might be thinking that this is ridiculous. I mean, it really is. Only girls fight in tanks in this universe. Senshado matches are conducted in cities, where property damage is allowed, let alone having to repair tanks. Oh yeah, and girls pop out of their hatches when shells are fired at them, and even when they get hit and the tank turns over 50 times, the people inside are fine. Did I mention that there are crazy tactics that wouldn't ever be viable in real life that are used here, like using tanks as bridges?
But this is a good thing. This way, I don't need to watch something akin to 86 or Princess Principle, where girls are killing people in a battlefield or fight, only to return to acting like a normal high schooler, like they never experienced a life or death situation in the first place. This way, tank fighting can be viewed as a sport, and there's nothing strange about girls doing tank fights as a sport. What were your expectations? Realistic tank warfare? Come on now. Usually, tanks fought with air support or infantry, and at the very least, nothing like a battlefield where there were only tanks. Or what, you wanted to watch yet another "spy organization" where seemingly normal high school girls are actually working for an evil organization, and have been trained in tank warfare since they were young orphans!
I'm not a history buff, nor am I a tank buff, and nor am I a war buff, but I think that if you're watching a show where high school girls are fighting in tanks, you should view it as more of a fantastical setting rather than one grounded in reality.
In fact, the world building, is fun, surprisingly enough. Schools are located on aircraft carrier ships, and that brings a whole different dynamic and buildings that Girls and Panzer brings. You get to see below the decks of the ship, you see naval structures, and overall, the shift in setting to a ship on a sea makes for a whole new experience for the show. One of my favorite episodes was actually the OVA, where the girls explain how the ship functions, from its structures, to how it is manned, to the many different places you can explore in the ship.
Now, onto the meat of the show: characters and story. Honestly, they're both not amazing, but for the time that this show had, it isn't bad. In the first season, the anime tried to cram in three fights, introduction of 5 different tank crews, as well as character development and worldbuilding. That is not going to feasibly happen in 12 episodes if you're not cutting corners. Of course, the anime is going to not develop each and every tank crew. Instead, they're reduced to specific types of teams with there bizzare habits and personalities. You got the freshmen crew, who adore the upperclassmen while also being weak willed and overall, childish. You have the volleyball team, the history nerds, the gaming club, you have the sailors, you have the student council team, and you finally have the main characters anglerfish team. While each team may get varying levels of dialogue and screen time, for the most part, you're going to be seeing them in tanks more often than not as long as they're not the anglerfish team. And that's a bit sad. I actually like most of the clubs, and they give a lot of personality despite their lack of characterization and screen time. I wonder how good the show would have gotten if it had more time? There's just lacking slice of life scenes that are essential to making good characters. I especially liked the history crew the most, but they just don't have a lot of time to shine in the show, which is a shame. I say that the anglerfish gets a lot of screen time outside of tanks, and while that might be true, they're not super amazing by themselves. Their introductions and subsequently becoming friends are definitely boring to watch, but it's acceptable for what it is. The anglerfish team is extremely average in terms of their characters. Not great, but also not bad.
Fights also suffer from pacing issues. A lot of the fights in the show are too fast paced, and even though tanks being taken down should be a big turning point in fights, a lot of the time, you can't even keep track how the tanks got shot down since the scene immediately moves on. There's not much of a focus on understanding the viewpoints of either team, with their limited information, and tactics can be sloppy at times or outright not matter at all. Each team has their own set of tanks, and there could have been a much bigger potential for amazing fights. Yes, there are still fun fights to watch, and each team certainly has their own strategies. Anzio's team has smaller tanks, but manage to overwhelm bigger ones with numbers advantages, Continuation high school has a skilled sniper, and so does the US team. You have a lot of variation in setting, whether be the tanks fighting in an amusement park or a snow covered mountain, or even just a jungle. However, You really would have wished for more in depth fights. Some sports anime drag out one quarter in a soccer game for episodes on end, but entire 10 vs 10 tank fights are conducted in a mere episode in Girls und Panzer. There's spectators, but you certainly never hear commentators talking about the games, which would have helped with the pacing a lot more in terms of discerning each teams' intentions. The only "good" fight that I really liked was the first movie, which is to be expected, since it was about 50+ minutes long. There were still not a lot of tactics used in that movie, but it was also a 30 vs 30 tank fight, so I'll give it some slack.
Strategies, in the end, become essential only in certain turning points. Like, a tank physically blocking a tunnel to buy time so that their teammate can fight one on one with the flag tank was an essential strategy, but on the other hand, they don't matter at all. If a team gets high ground advantage on a canyon precipice and are bombarding tanks in the river below, I expect there to be at least some losses, but there aren't any. If a team manages to get the other side's tanks stranded on a bridge where there's nowhere else to go, I expect some losses. But there aren't any. Well structured fights are not Girls Und Panzer's forte.
The lack of attention to detail in fights go hand in hand with lack of character development. If characters were more developed, they could have their time to shine in fights, and they sometimes do have their minute of glory, eliminating one or two tanks before going down, but overall, it's usually just Miho and her crew steamrolling every other tank while the rest of her crews handle the scraps. I mean, in Saishuushou Part 3, Miho's crew singlehandedly crushes 5 tanks out of 10 despite being outnumbered 3 to 1 or 5 to one the entire time.
Yet, even so, I did like all of the characters, and the teams they fought equally possesses fun characters. In the end, all of the fights are really messy with not too much thought put into it, but it still puts out a strong showing. Tank CGI is actually a lot better than you'd expect for anime CGI, so there were no problems with me watching it. The bizzare ways that tanks fought in the anime were also fun to watch. You just have to set your expectations for shows like these, and if you do, Girls Und Panzer is a fun watch that manages to incorporate high school girls and tank fighting in a cohesive fashion, which is not something I have ever seen done before in other shows.
