If you thought Flying Circus from last week’s review was an odd sport practiced by odd schools in an odd world, wait until you see Sensha-do: tank warfare mock combat for girls who attend academies situated on titanic island-ships.
It’s easier to get into than it sounds.
That is, probably, because the show as a whole follows an extremely familiar pattern: a ragtag bunch of misfits have to get together to win some major event at which they’re far from favored in order to raise money and save some institution important to them.
In this case, the blanks in those mad libs are filled in with “the Sensha-do Championship”, “Their school-ship”, and a cast of ultimately surprisingly decent characters. The twist, I guess, is that most of them don’t know for most of the show’s run what’s at stake. Let’s get through the main cast and how they relate to the story.
The main character is Miho Nishizumi. She comes from a family famed for Sensha-do, with their own style and all that jazz, but she’s something of the misfit of the family. Miho doesn’t like tanks and really, really does not want to get involved in Sensha-do, with some traumatic incident in her past (revealed later to be her flubbing a major competition in order to save friends in peril, against the principles of her family and particularly her big sister and mother) causing her to transfer to a school that had no Sensha-do team.
The student council, however, is entirely inclined to bully Miho through every means they can until she breaks under the pressure and agrees to go for their revived Sensha-do program as her club.
Wherever Miho goes, her new friends seem to come with. Most important are Saori Takebe (the romance nut), Hana Isuzu (the refined lady), Yukari Akiyama (the tank nut), and Mako Reizei (the lazy genius, brought in a hair later than the other leads). These characters end up forming the crew of the tank Miho commands (with lesser teams from the school in the other tanks they scrape together) and act as her primary core of friends and confidants. Together with Miho they get the most scenes and do the majority of heavy lifting for the show.
The first movements of the show involve just setting up the team, scavenging working tanks from where they’ve been abandoned or hidden on campus and getting everyone who hasn’t touched a tank before (everyone but Miho) able to perform the basic operation. During this phase, the biggest character movements are getting Mako integrated with the crew (she’s a little obstinate even if she is a prodigy) and starting Miho along her long route from being someone literally bullied into doing something she hates to actually liking the sport and the memories she can make with her friends through it.
After that, we get a match with the ambiguously British team from among rival schools. Yeah, while protagonist school has miscellaneous tanks the other schools, despite being seemingly of Japanese origin, tend to have tanks belonging to one of the major belligerents of WWII and all the trappings and vibes of being the schoolgirl stand-ins for that nation’s armies. This goes all the way to the surprisingly good soundtrack incorporating a lot of nation-appropriate traditional and/or military music. Since it’s just a practice match, the Brits actually win, but Miho and her team give far better accounts of themselves than anyone, and the match proves a spurring moment for all the various protagonist tank groups to up their game, which more or less moves us along to the championship run.
In terms of what technically happens, there aren’t really twists from the sport underdog formula. Team Hero goes up against, defeats, and largely befriends the Americans (who had a sub-commander using a dirty wire-tap) and Russians (who give the main team a serious run for their money, in which the beans are spilled to everyone that the school’s existence is on the line) before going up the elite favorite championship team led by Miho’s elder sister, Maho.
Along the way, we get the character arcs. The biggest one outside our lead is probably Hana dealing with the fact that her mother doesn’t support her doing Sensha-do rather than flower arrangement, and that until she comes around to cheer the school on in the end there’s kind of an estrangement between them. Mako also has family issues, but while they threaten her participation at least once they don’t feel quite as emotional.
And of course there’s Miho learning to enjoy Sensha-do and then having to face up to her sister and mother and the fact that neither of them can accept that she doesn’t play by their ruthless, efficient style. It seems to be more on the mother’s part (cementing the show having a sub theme of working out troubled mother-daughter relationships), as Maho is more willing to let Miho’s successes be credited to her, but it’s still Maho who Miho has to have it out with on the battlefield, ending with defeating her tank to tank
So, let’s talk about that tank combat. Girls und Panzer is honestly pretty balanced between slice of life on one side and Sensha-do on the other. The slice of life is rather mild, but the tank warfare… well, on one side, it’s a sport here. Little white flags pop out of tanks that are hit and while Miho’s background proves that dangerous accidents can happen (in that case, a tank falling in a river might have endangered its crew before relief could arrive) it’s by in large not presented as particularly dangerous or war-like.
However, the actual scenes of tank warfare, even as a sport, are dynamic and engaging. Whatever goofy frame story is given to keep Sensha-do fun and harmless, you can tell that the creators must really have enjoyed the mechanical and technical aspects of military history, to which I almost feel like Yukari may have been something of an author avatar.
It’s not exactly combat and it rarely feels like action sequences, but these little slices of tank warfare are well done and carry most of the interest in the show with a decent showing of tactics as well as competent writing. I don’t want to over-praise it, but it more than does its job.
And in all honesty, despite this being a spoiler review (the underdogs win and save their school, fancy that. Miho earns her sister’s respect and Hana her mother’s acceptance) I could basically leave this one off at that. But, I feel like I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the most interesting part of this series… how it establishes and uses its world.
Because when you think about it, from our perspective, the world of Girls und Panzer is absolutely nutty. It takes place in some unspecified future, but most of the style of the world is very retro, much like how Takt Op. Destiny created a 2050 America that looked and felt more like 1950 most of the time. In that future, the practice of mock combat with tanks is a traditional feminine martial art, to the point where it’s mentioned offhand that boys just don’t seem to go with tanks to the people there. So presumably we’re pretty far from when legit war was fought mostly by males… if it ever happened this way. Some of the minor characters make enough references to history that you can think most of time played out mostly as we know it, but it’s weird to reconcile.
And even that has nothing on the conceit of school ships. It seems like every high school, by default, exists on a ship. The school ships seem to be built like aircraft carriers, but they are drastically larger than any carrier that’s ever been built. Even the sight of these behemoths in port (somehow) doesn’t do the scale justice: when scenes are taking place aboard, it seems like a school, a town, and a fair chunk of countryside that all just happens to actually be artificial. And this is taken as just… normal. It’s a fact of life that bears little remark. And I have, outright, no idea how or why the world is like this, either in character or from the perspective of a creator. I guess it makes it make more sense that it would take money to keep a school literally afloat, but I’m not sure such a drastic element was necessary.
Yet, for all that I’m pointing out how absolutely insane all of this is, because the show largely has the characters take it in stride… the audience does as well. Girls und Panzer isn’t the only work for which this is something I’ve noticed is true, but it is a good example: as a viewer, there’s a lot we’re willing to accept in terms of breaks from reality as long as they’re internally consistent and don’t get in the way of the emotional journeys of the characters. Looking back at the show, yeah, it’s pretty impressively weird. But it never feels weird, and given how this mostly wants to be a common Slice of Life/Sports affair, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that’s to the show’s advantage.
In the end, the grade I offer Girls und Panzer is a B. A lot of the cast is flat extras, but the characters who get development wear it nicely. The plot is every ultra-basic sports setup, but the “tank combat as sport” aspect is actually really well handled and passes episodes with welcome material. It doesn’t do much that’s really amazing, but there’s not any point at which it fails and at least a few points on which it’s doing markedly superior work. I’d recommend it as a nice show to chill with, that’s never really going to take you too far out of your comfort zone.