Having finished up watching Dragon Pilot with The Queen, I went in search of something else on Netflix that hit the right notes of “Enough action for Dad, but still sufficiently age appropriate and interesting for a six-year-old girl.” I landed on Girls und Panzer.
Originally airing in 2012, Girls und Panzer is a love letter to tank nerds which masquerades as a Moe high school anime. In the world of Girls und Panzer, girls only schools around the world compete in the noble art of sensha-dō” (戦車道, lit. “the way of the tank”), or “Tankery” in the English dub. Part mock battle, part martial art, it serves as the main reason in the show for having a wide variety of WWII (generally) era tanks engaging in non-lethal battles.
The show centers around Miho Nishizumi, a new transfer student who joins Ōarai Girls High School to get away from tankery. However, when the only way to keep her new school from being shutdown is for them to reconstitute a tankery program and win an international tournament, Miho takes command of the motley quintet of tanks that the students are able to scrounge up.
Let’s get this out of the way really quickly: the background world of Girls und Panzer makes no sense whatsoever. There’s all this military hardware (tanks, cargo transports, and aircraft carriers) but no particular reason for why it was developed in the first place. The girls of Ōarai Girls High School appear to live on a ShōKaku-Class Aircraft Carrier which has been converted to become a floating city. The American school appears to live on a Nimitz-Class supercarrier. Just file the background under Rule of Cool and leave it at that. We don’t need a massively detailed backstory to enjoy watching Shermans and Panzers fight each other, do we?
The tank battles are the entire point of the show, after all. Ōarai Girls High School manages to initially field five tanks: a Panzer 38(t), Type 89 I-Go, StuG. III Ausf.F, M3 Lee, and a Panzer IV.Later on, they add a Char B1 bis, Porche Tiger, and Type-3 Chi-Nu. Against them are arrayed a series of other schools, each of which has some sort of theme: the English school uses only English tanks, the Americans mainly drive M4 Sherman variants, the Russians are mostly in T-34s, etc.
Every single tank that appears in this show has some basis in reality, even if only as a speculative prototype. This show is the reason that my YouTube recommendations are now full of Chieftan’s Hatch episodes, and a major factor in me finally jumping onto the War Thunder bandwagon. Take away the tanks and it’s a pretty standard story of “Eclectic group of high-schoolers save their school and learn lessons about friendship and cooperation along the way.” But that’s the point, it’s got tanks. Lots, and lots of lovingly researched, carefully rendered tanks. And that, quite honestly, is more than enough to make it worth watching. At the very least, it’s no sillier than Iron Eagle!