Years before Girls’ Frontline, there was another anime that presented cute girls who were also, somehow, famed military combat rifles. While Moe Anthropomorphizations are common enough, there’s always that little hurdle of getting used to them, especially when it’s not just in the background but rather direct about the concept.
Enter Upotte!! (the title is very excited), that aforementioned show about guns who are also cute girls doing cute things (while going to school and learning how to gun better). At a mere 10 episodes there is, for better or worse, not that much to get through, and it’s hard to imagine it being less effective than GFL was, so let’s go ahead and dig in.
Our lead character is the Belgian rifle FNC, often referred to as Funko, who is something of the ringleader for her group of friends that form the core of this show’s cast of gun girl schoolgirls in perilously short skirts. They attend Seishou Academy, which appears to be a school entirely for human guns that is run, as is obvious, without any regard to the national affiliation of the hardware they might have been.
The lives of Funko and her friends are set to be shaken up by the arrival of a new teacher… pretty much just known as “the new teacher” who seems set to be a rare but not totally unique male on campus. He’s also got no idea what he’s doing and a bad habit of sticking his foot in his mouth that sees him on the business end of Funko’s gun-ness more than once.
The general screw-up ways of Funko and her friends get them antagonized/helped by Funko’s older (higher caliber) sister FAL and her friends. They set up what seems like a rigged contest against their little sisters with escape from an eternity of remedial lessons on the line. But after an intense game of capture the flag with live ammo it turns out the game was always intended to be kind of a make-up exam with the junior students mostly passing.
This is… about as much plot as we get in the show to be honest. It’s cute guns doing gun things (cutely), but they do excuse a chance for someone to shoot somebody else more often than not. The teacher is also hardly in this, showing up as more than a bit part in only a few episodes (mostly to get shot by Funko in a comedy slapstick sort of way, though of course he’s used to resolve the finale.)
Technically, there is a “big” plot, taking the meat of three episodes, where some AK-based transfer students try to cheat their way to victory against M16 (one of the main band). The lead of the two is a creepy sadist with major psycho-yuri vibes towards Funko that seem entirely too twisted for where the show normally lives, but after being dealt a defeat thanks to her own arrogance and M16 learning an important lesson about friendship she at least excuses herself from the show.
After that, Upotte!! just sort of gives up and plays itself out with a series of obligatory school episodes: Fun in the Snow/New Years, School Culture Festival, Beach/Resort/Vacation episode (Swimsuits and onsen, oh my)… You get the idea. Just stuff some extra filler at the end, because 10 episodes was a terrifying amount of run time.
Well, there was some effort given, as in the second half of the beach episode and the true final episode they try to bring in another plot, one significantly darker and heavier in feel, like there’s going to be actual drama. Which is something of a non-starter when this thing runs entirely on “it looks cute so we don’t have to explain anything” but so be it. In said plot, a group of nebulously Eastern bloc terrorists attack the gun girls while they’re on vacation, doing a hell of a lot of property damage in the process.
This gives us probably the only fight in the series that’s supposed to have stakes, as well as the one that feels the most dynamic, as is fitting for the finale. Even the crazy sadist comes back to help our heroes. Teacher also gets shot in a non-comedic fashion, but apparently there’s a setting rule that’s only worth mentioning in the last five minutes where the gun girls can’t kill humans (at least without a human wielder of their own) no matter how much damage they do. This allows teacher to get in the middle of things and nonsensically defuse the situation in order to bring the show to an end.
As much as this is a basically plotless show about cute guns doing cute things, it does have some charm points beyond that. One is the fact that the creators worked in a ton of little references and gags, many of which don’t even have attention drawn to them, that tie into the aspects of history and nationality. This goes beyond all the girls having traits explicitly from their gun aspect, and goes more into things like, when the girls are having lunch, it’s not just generic bento food: each lunch is packed with national specialties, like the British L85A1 having scotch eggs while Funko, being from Belgium, packs a chocolate-dipped waffle.
But even more than that, the show oddly often segues into actual history lessons about arms development and deployment. They take you completely out of the moment and last oddly long, but… yeah, you could actually learn something watching this show. Something useful? Probably not, but design and development woes, treaty history, international compromises, and weird corporate details that have legitimately shaped the landscape of military hardware all come up in these little drive-by lessons. And…. you know what, it’s actually kind of entertaining in its own right.
Weirdly, I think the ad bumpers kind of tell you everything this show is about. I’ll let this one speak for itself.
Ecchi fanservice and history facts. That’s this show in a nutshell. I picked this bumper in particular because while the outfits are quite uncommon, most of the others are more chaste than show itself would typically be. Upotte!! is not particularly raunchy. It does skew more cute than anything. But the ecchi is 100% there and perhaps the one thing that the bumpers with characters in their uniforms might downplay.
There is also action in this show and… well it’s better than the action in Girls’ Frontline, that’s for sure. There’s better weight to the gunfire, and hits are fairly sold. Nobody’s quite as moronic as the mass-produced enemies either, which makes fights more interesting, and weapon reliability feels like it comes up in a meatier way here (mostly at the expense of L85A1. I get the impression the real thing is a rather poor piece of kit, and thanks to this show have an understanding of the production history as to why.)
For that matter, comparing Upotte!! to that other gun girls show (I kind of hate picking on it so much, they’re not trying to do the same thing), the gun-ness is much more integrated there. In the other show, they were just odd names that might have been representative of the girl’s weapon of choice (or assignment), but there wasn’t really any way to be sure unless you had the knowledge going in to spot the difference.
On the other hand, as I may have alluded to, the lore is another story. In GFL, there’s a clear theme: the girls are robot soldiers with very particular capabilities. Here, the girls are guns. How does that work? Well there are some – actually many – direct comparisons made, like a gun’s stock seems to determine the girl’s butt and apparently character-required style of panties. A magazine seems to be likened to the stomach or at least ammo to food, with eating bad food resulting in firing off rounds with gunky powder, and dropping a magazine due to malfunction causing the girl to probably throw up.
But… why? How? When they shoot the guns that they also are, do they manifest them out of thin air, or are the machine parts always around. It’s not like they’re conjuring bullets or doing finger guns, the entire device that is their body just appears in their hands between cuts. Both the gun and the girl seem to effect the other. M16, who needs a lot of maintenance, takes a long time in the bath but also field-strips and services her… self… between rounds of a competition. How does that work? Why is this world like this? Is this a weird next gen thing? Why old guns then? If not, why doesn’t the teacher know a single thing about these girls when he seems to be fairly familiar with mundane firearms? Why is Teach hospitalized for the first episode after Funko slapstick shoots him up, but in the last episode he’s shot once, put bleeding on the floor, and then the blood vanishes and he can get up and give everybody a “stand down” speech?
“It looks cute, so who cares?”
That’s the only answer I think anyone has. And, fair, it’s an answer. This show’s premise is insane from the start so there’s a degree that just rolling with it is a basic buy-in. And to the show’s credit it made doing so fairly easy until that last episode threw us that truly incomprehensible curveball. I’ve said it before and I’ve said it again: the rules of a fictional setting can be as insane as you want them to be, as long as you establish them well and obey them meaningfully. The girls are also guns. This is established. This is used. It interacts well. Guns without a human can’t kill humans and we learn this in probably the last five minutes? Um…
Anyway, this show needs a grade. It’s fluff with a batty premise, but I can’t bring myself to really give it lower than a C- for the crime of being what it wanted to be. There are probably better ways to spend your time but if you want to learn a little about arms manufacture history while being fed some fairly light ecchi, it’s fine enough that there are also plenty of worse ways to spend your time.