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| Overall | Art | Animation | Character Design | Music | Series Story | Episode Story | Reviewer | |
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| Watch | 9 | 9 | 7 | 7 | 6 | 6 |
 Ggultra2764
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[series:2631#1552] |
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Girls und Panzer is one of a number of titles following a recent trend in anime that involves mixing slice-of-life comedy involving high school girls with weaponry of some sort. In this case, the girls here are involved in a competition where they drive World War II era tanks and cooperate as teams to dispatch the flag tank of the opposing team. The premise requires quite a bit of suspension of disbelief in order to watch through and is pretty much the main attraction to this series as otherwise, the characters follow the standard archetypes of the "high school girls" approach to slice-of-life comedy and don't have much depth to them for the most part. While cliched, the "doing your best" plot element to the series is decently structured as the Orai student council's reasons for recruiting Miho into their reformed tank-combat club get revealed later in the series and the club members learn to improve in their abilities and cohesion as a team as episodes progress. The tank battles are the highlight to the series as they are nicely rendered in CG animation and blend in almost seamlessly with the regular animation. The animation for tank battles are also fluid and smooth without any noticeable degradation of detail from the renderings of tanks. The battles themselves also show a decent amount of tension as the Orai school club members make use of battle tactics involving hit-and-run, battle terrain and flaws in the designs of enemy tanks to compensate for inferior numbers and technology compared to other schools involved in the tank combat competition. While somewhat engaging thanks to its tank battles, Girls und Panzer doesn't really offer much else to stick out from the mold of slice-of-life comedies and is mostly forgettable for me otherwise since the title only seems to be coming from a short-term trend for title premises. It is worth a watch for some quick entertainment, but I wouldn't consider watching it more than once. Last updated Wednesday, December 25 2013. Created Wednesday, December 25 2013. | ||||||||
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 Stretch
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[series:2631#628] | ||||||
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(Watch+ or Rent-) (All (?) episodes watched): This is a show which I may be obliged to watch even though it probably won't be very good, because I used to be into WWII tanks and stuff like that. Somebody like me catches the significance of the girls' birthdates. My guess is that this will be much like Upotte!!--a show which relies on fascination with weaponry to draw viewers in, in spite of the rest of it being mediocre. 'Panzerfahren', we are told, is 'the martial art traditionally reserved for girls'--because girls presumably make the best tank crewmen. Studying it 'means studying what it means to be a woman'. This is a joke, right? Maybe not; I can't tell whether this show is trying to be a comedy or be serious. The premise is absurd, but there are few jokes. Maybe this is meant as more of a gambare (do your best) sort of show. Main character Miho flashes back to some sort of traumatic memory regarding Panzerfahren, which suggests that it will be taken seriously. It takes a while to get started, yet the girls are given little personality. No technical or historical notes were included in episode one, as was sometimes done during Upotte. And, as if this was not confusing enough, a bizarre twist is added at the very end. You wonder how the show will handle the violence that is inherent in AFV combat. No laughs, no drama, no personalities, not even much fanservice, just tanks--what's the idea here? Tanks and moe basically. Can that really work? When the turn of episode four came about, in my list of fifteen or so Fall 2012 series which I'm watching, I couldn't resist skipping it and watching something else. This show doesn't offend me, but there just doesn't seem to be much of anything worth watching. The story doesn't seem to be going anywhere, it's just eye candy and moe, which I've never really understood anyhow. I did come back and watch episode five eventually. While it is just barely on the right side of the line that divides shows which I consider worth watching from shows that aren't, Panzer has a few benefits. You do get a fairly good idea of what it's like to ride in a tank, for example moving the vehicle in one direction while keeping the turret trained in another. It's almost like a video game. Unfortunately, the girls are terrible shots and often do foolish things that no halfway decent tank crewman ever would--like sticking their heads out of a hatch while shells are screaming past within inches of them. And the scene in episode seven of one of them needing to use a fire extinguisher to put out a blaze inside the crew compartment of her tank makes it clear once again how absurd this premise is. It's not a game when you might get killed. And why are machine guns included? They cannot harm tanks, they can only kill people. The show makes little attempt to derive any humor from the premise itself, just from the everyday antics of the girls, and you wouldn't need tanks to do that. The whole premise just doesn't make any sense, so you can't squeeze much humor out of it. I find that each week this show has a lower priority on my watch list than the week before; this week it was last. I guess the girls have managed to grow on me somewhat, because I haven't dropped this show altogether. It almost seems to be dropping me, however. Out of eleven episodes, there have been two 'review' episodes which basically remind us of what has already happened without introducing much new material. Apparently the series ends just before the critical final match which will determine if the girls manage to save their school or not. There is at least one OVA, which I figured must be the route you must go to find out how things end--but it turned out to be a fanservice powered episode about the girls going to a store to buy swimsuits. A show which has such wobbly legs shouldn't be playing around with it's viewers this much. It turns out that there is a conclusion after all, in the form of one or more OVAs (IIRC). This time the girls take on the ultimate opponent, the German team, which is equipped with a horde of Panthers, Tigers, Jagdpanthers, and even a Maus(!) tank--a tank so large that it had a 75mm gun as it's secondary weapon. As with all the battles, the tactics and marksmanship of the players is laughable, but this conclusion was almost hilarious and I enjoyed it. It did a lot to salvage the series as a whole. Once you get used to it, or know what to expect, the ridiculous premise of Girls- can be a lot of fun. The silly premise must be why this show seems to have gotten a good deal of international attention--twice, people who know little or nothing about anime have mentioned to me that they had heard of it. Last updated Friday, December 27 2013. Created Thursday, October 18 2012. | ||||||||
