I never thought the “cute girls doing cute things” genre could be so subversive. Girls und Panzer goes beyond a story of high school girls driving tanks; it sets up tanks and high school girls as inseparable. 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. 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. 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. I never thought this genre could produce something so subversive, and I never thought it could produce something so unabashedly fun.
There is a story, but it ultimately boils down to a shell on which to structure tank fight after tank fight. 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. 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. 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. Soon they are in a full-on mock battle against the famed St. Gloriana high school team, and then the annual high school tank fighting tournament. 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.
Not that the slice of life is bad by any stretch. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
The other schools too are a key part of the comedy. Each one is themed around a different country, both in their tank models and in their ridiculous characters. The St. 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). 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. For example, at the beginning of the semifinals Pravda’s team drives through the heavy snow singing the song their commander is named for, the World War II wartime song “Katyusha”, a fifty-second scene that is uproariously funny as well as impressing a real sense of their absurd national identity. And of course the American fight songs are all too familiar; even with only the instrumentals my group and I started singing right along to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”.
And then there of course are the tank fights themselves. The project had military supervisor Suzuki Takaaki on board, who has been involved in military advising on anime from Strike Witches to Last Exile, and what he brings to Girls und Panzer in terms of tank knowledge is indispensable. The in-depth descriptions of the various tanks are saved from feeling dull by the ways in which the team has to factor in armor and firepower concerns when doing their reconnaissance or formulating their strategies. Half the show is spent watching both sides narrowly miss one another, as no one ever said tanks in motion provided the most accurate shooting. Weight concerns, turning and reloading times, and the factor of treads are all omnipresent, with the CG modeling blending in beautifully and creating tank fights that acutely feel like actual tank fights, even if they’ve tossed out all notions of safety concerns. We see elimination-style battles and destroy the flagship-style battles alike, and we see how Miho plans based on whether they are fighting on even footing or if the lackluster Ooarai lineup is massively outgunned. With only ten to thirty tanks in the average match, which runs two to three episodes straight, there is no time spent indiscriminately mowing down the enemy forces; it all comes down to clever planning and picking their battles one by one.
Everything about the world contributes to this atmosphere of watching every tank fight with a mix of tension and just plain excitement and laughter. The tank fights take place in remote areas with hills and fields, but often they end up going into the towns themselves, where the townspeople cheer on these high school girls who are ruining their streets and wasting their shops with missed shells. In the same fight there is a short comedic bit where an enemy tank sees a parking garage door opening slowly and lines themselves up to shoot the Ooarai tank that is presumably coming out, only to get shot from behind by the actual tank hiding in the below-ground parking spot behind them, all set to a marching tune. Later on the loader in Miho’s tank infiltrates the American team to get their list of tanks and strategies, but the whole thing is told through her expose-style film of it all, without any stealthy maneuvers in the least.
I could go on for hours just quoting scenes from the show, because every single one felt clever. Every single one felt fresh and fun and alive. One detail is that most high schools are located on giant aircraft carriers, and they only dock to do their tank fighting with the rest of the population. Why? Because the writers felt like it, apparently. Girls und Panzer is so unafraid to be itself and do whatever it wants, from the tiny details to the bombastic fights told in the style of a three-act play. We forget that tanks aren’t an actual sport, and that most of these fights would have killed half the cast by now. We forget that society would normally look at the line “guys and tanks seem kinda mismatched” with disbelief. We altogether forget that we’re watching a show, and just get pulled into the flow of things. I may not be feminine enough to jump in a tank, but I’ll take every minute of watching it that I can.