When their futures are at stake, a group of high school girls will learn the art of Tankery.
What They Say:
Putting schoolgirls in vintage military tanks and letting them run amok on a battlefield may sound completely crazy, but that’s Tankery, the addictive sport/history lesson/free-for-all that’s exploding at schools across Japan!
Except at Oarai Academy, which is why Miho Nishizumi chose to hide there after drawing her “gun-fu” legend Mother’s ire. Then Oarai is caught up in a Tankery competition to save the school, and the resulting arms build-up requires Miho to say farewell to her arms! It’s a Tank Heaven for not so little girls as they blow things up in the most delightful ways in the uber-sized and bomb-tastic OVA and TV series collection of Girls und Panzer!
The Review:
Audio:
The audio presentation for this release is quite good as we get the original Japanese language track and the new English language dub in stereo, both of which are encoded using the DTS-HD MA lossless codec. The series is one that has a lot going on with a wide range of characters, many on screen at the same time, talking to and at each other and in a number of different situations that add to the overall presentation. The dialogue is well placed throughout and some depth definitely works really well with it. When it comes to the tanks and the action, it definitely hits some very good moments throughout as it has some good impact and a heightened audio level that brings a lot of it home in a great way. Some of the scenes where the tanks fire are just strong and definitely stand out, sometimes in comparison to other tank sequences, where it can startle and remind you of what you’re dealing with. Dialogue itself is clean and clear throughout and we didn’t have any problems with dropouts or distortions during regular playback.
Video:
Originally starting in 2012, the transfer for this twelve-episode series is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.78:1 in 1080p using the AVC codec. The series is spread across two discs with nine on the first and three on the second where we also get two full-length recap-style episodes. The third disc gives us the OVAs so there’s plenty of space for everything. Animated by Actas, the series has a bright, vibrant, and appealing look to it both in the regular animation and the 3DCG modeling of the tanks. There’s a lot of detail to both sides of it and a good bit of variety across the screen with the characters involved and the combination of the two comes across very well here. The colors are bright and full with good saturation while being free of blocking or other significant noise issues. The action sequences are well-paced, especially in the last couple of episodes as the battles get more complicated, and it all has a smooth and solid look to it that definitely serves the material well. There’s a lot to like with the transfer here as it gives us a great-looking show with a lot of pop.
Packaging:
The packaging for this release is kept simple as we get a standard-sized Blu-ray case that holds the two discs inside on a hinge while the third disc is against the back interior wall. The front cover for this uses the really fun image of the core group of girls together laying about in their uniforms as they play with toy tanks or check out technical manuals. The expressions say a lot about each character as well and just how they compose themselves here. It’s very industrial for obvious reasons and though there’s that cold and hard aspect, the girls bring some good color to it. The back cover uses the pinks and greens in blocks to break things up well and we get some fun bits with the character artwork, shots from the show, and the tagline. The premise is fairly easy to read with black on green and it covers things well. The extras are clearly listed and we get a clear breakdown of the episode and disc count. Production credits are clearly broken out and easy to read while the technical grid covers the setup of the discs in a solid way that’s accurate. No show-related inserts are included nor is there a reversible cover.
Extras:
The second disc is where all the extras are and there’s some good stuff here for the TV series. The biggest things are the two introductions episodes, which are full-length episodes in their own right, which basically recap and introduce us to the world that the show exists in, the characters and their relationships as well as the tanks and mechanics of it all. After watching the show, there wasn’t much to really engage here and they were more useful during the broadcast where they helped to plug in some delays in the show. Beyond that, we get the clean opening and closing sequences as well as the various promos and TV spots for the show, and the same for the OVAs.
While a manga series was kicked off just before the series originally aired to help gear up for the show, Girls und Panzer is an original work from Actas that ran for twelve episodes and had a couple of recaps and a brief OVA series as well. The series has a particular draw to it with its blend of girls and military hardware that’s made more so with word that the military advisor for Strike Witches and Upotte!!, Takaaki Suzuki, was involved with this one as well. This basically leads you to wonder which of these series will it be more like since they’re both quite different in what they do even though they share a similar bond through the heavy military style and the attention to detail with weaponry and gear. I had checked out the first episode when it first aired, but I was too burned out on the Upotte!! show at the time to really give this a good chance. And I think the marathon session I had here definitely was for the better.
The series operates in a world that’s just like normal except for one distinct fact; the martial arts skill of the day for girls is that of tank battles. This is what we see at the start as a match is underway in the wilds as we see two teams go at it, including one with a variety of different styles of tank manufacture as well as color since we even get bright (gaudy bright) pink and yellow ones. The match is simple but effective in showing off the way they move and how the teams operate, giving us a clue to a decent bond that’s at play here among the girls that work and school together. Like a lot of shows, we get many of the usual trappings of an all-girls school life, from uniforms to a high-end school, just with the added fun of them driving around in tanks.
The premise of the world is given quickly at the start of the school year, which the show delves into fully early on, with the friendships that are there and the introduction of Tankery as a new elective to be had there. One that the student council president strongly suggests that new student Miho take up. The full auditorium presentation of Tankery is hilarious as it’s chock full of propaganda, including the fact that men will adore you should you excel in it. This gets several of the girls very excited about it even as it feels like it’s right out of the fifties. This then segues into the next part as we see the group of girls that sign up for it, though they’re mostly just ciphers at this point with little in the way of distinct personalities. They’re all nice and pleasant and we see a good-sized group that will come together for it, with the incentive of a big national event coming for it. I like the respect and awe they have for the tank they check out at the very end, but the whole pull-back sequence from there to reveal where they really are is just… weird. Revealing that the town, school, and grounds around it are basically a city on an oversized aircraft carrier? This is hugely intriguing and we see a couple of these at times throughout the season, but it’s sadly kept to more just a curiosity than an actual story device.
Girls und Panzer gives us a very large cast of characters to work with and most of them are pretty much cutouts when you get down to it. With the Sensho-do program that’s started up for the tankery at the school, we get the usual pulling together of disparate parts to build something that has to compete in the nationals against other schools after going through some qualifiers. This school manages to pull together five very different tanks, each of which does have its own history, and the teams break down well. While we do get a command team who has some personality as we learn why they’re putting all of this together later on, we get some that don’t get explored at all, such as the volleyball girls who join in hopes of doing something with that team. But largely, we focus on the core five that make up the Anglerfish team that uses the Panzer IV model.
The core of the group is Miho, a high school girl who comes from a long line of tank commanders and even participated in the nationals the year prior, which went very badly for her. So badly that she came to this school, Oorai, because it doesn’t have a Sensho-do program. So naturally when one starts up, she really doesn’t want any part of it but gets caught up in it because she does make friends here and is drawn to them because they don’t see her in the way she does. Because of her lineage, training, and general skill, she is the ace in the hole here and it is something that is used regularly as the matches go on. She’s not exactly an ultimate tactical genius or anything, but she’s smart and competent and has a crew that she can work well with. It also doesn’t hurt that the other teams they face underestimate them regularly since it’s a startup school Sensho-do program.
Because of the style of the series, it’s not one that we get a lot of detail with the characters that fleshes them out. We get their personalities well enough, and some like Miho obviously get some attention paid to their backgrounds, but most just exist as going to school, participating in the mandatory elective, and working their tanks. There is some fun downtime, but that revolves around the tanks and experiences as well. I’m rather mixed on whether this is a good or bad thing though because the show does run fairly tight in terms of being all about the qualifying matches and moving on to the bigger events. And that means a lot of strategic competitions that are definitely fun to watch. I grew up playing strategy games of this nature so there’s a lot to like here, from the open field matches to the forest layer. Going for a snow-based one was definitely fun but we also get a great and expansive city sequence, which left me wanting to know more about the past of the locale.
Girls und Panzer also goes in a direction that’s all too common and also understandable by giving us an all-female series. No boys show up here at all, which you can work to some degree before it just gets to be too much and you have to ignore that issue. The designs for the show definitely give us some cute girls with their own personalities through the look of them and they also evoke the feelings that the creators want by making them small and almost wispy, especially when placed against the tanks themselves. I liked the designs well enough but found myself wanting more character out of them. The tank side of the animation is really quite good and after the first episode or so, the blending (or lack of blending) between the 3DCG and the rest of the animation isn’t much of an issue. The fluidity of the tanks is important here in the action scenes and the details likely make fans of the mechanics of it all very happy. For me, it just looks good, has some solid diversity, and moves well throughout.
When Girls und Panzer was originally broadcast, issues came up that caused the final episodes to be delayed from their original December airdates until late March 2013. To help alleviate that in some ways, a series of OVAs were produced, totaling six, that ran for different lengths and just had a lot of fun with the characters while also expanding the world a bit. Some of the material really made me wish it was included in the series, and early on, while others are just the usual fluff that you do tend to get from the OVA releases of series so they can provide a bit more fanservice and teases of or outright nudity. That all has its place and Girls und Panzer with its OVAs definitely runs the gamut fairly well of what you can expect here.
Clocking in at just around 75 minutes for the equivalent of about three regular episodes, it’s hard to pin down a lot here and really say much about it because it’s mostly filling-in-the-blanks kind of stuff. The one that stuck out the most for me in terms of being connected was the fifth OVA which takes us back to episode ten of the series. It’s here that we get to follow Yukari and Erwin as they go on recon amid the battle with the Pravda students and find themselves lost after some playful banter. It’s not deep and we see how they ended up getting the Pravda uniforms, got close to that team for a bit, and got information that they used to help win the mission when they got back. But it’s the kind of episode that comes in rather unprepared, especially after the standalone nature of most of the other OVAs here, it took me a bit to really remember the structure of that episode. It’s definitely fun seeing them playing up Pravda roles and how poorly they did it.
A far better OVA is the third one in which the girls decide to go and explore the ship. I’m really intrigued by the idea of the school ship and what it represents, but it was so poorly dealt with in terms of explanations and details in the main series that getting some of its history here, and some of the world history explains why they’re on the ships, is intriguing. It’s not exactly the most sensical thing that the show can come up with to be sure as a way to ease tensions and expose kids to more cultures and types, but spending the time exploring the nature of the ship, the views, the people and even a 1/1000th scale model of it really made for an engaging bit of time. Which, sadly, was followed up by a four-minute OVA episode that had the girls – many of them – performing the Anglerfish dance across the ship.
Naturally, there has to be fanservice and silliness as well and it opens with that in a fun way as we get swimsuit shopping and sampling which leads to all sorts of quandaries for various characters unsure about their appearance. It also leads into another OVA that puts the girls from all the teams going off on a camping trip where they get to frolic in general, in swimsuits, and perform most of the usual camping tropes. Because of the run time and the nature of it, it’s not a very character-friendly series of episodes in most ways because you don’t really get to know anyone better and there’s no real stress or drama, but it’s like a sea of nameless characters going through the motions that we see in most OVA releases from regular series. And there is a charm to it, especially with the kind of polish we get from the animation and usage of the tropes here, that allows it to be utterly smile-inducing as it goes along. For the most part.
In Summary:
My initial experience with Girls und Panzer when it was first simulcast was one that sent me running from it. Getting into it later and as a full-binge viewing – beyond the broadcast hype of it all, it definitely made for a more enjoyable experience overall. This release by combining the TV show with the OVAs makes out pretty well so you get a solid packaging and the option to now explore the films that are coming out. The whole girls with tanks concept is an easy angle to work with but they manage it more creatively than I expected and it has some great animation and action to it. There are down and quiet moments, but it never feels like it drags or becomes dull. Some of the more interesting ideas in the show aren’t explored as much as I’d like, such as the ships and the nature of this world, but its focus on the tanks, the competitions, and the formation of the team is what definitely dominates here and it does what it needs to. If you’re late to this game, this is a great way to get a huge chunk of it and enjoy it.
Features:
Japanese DTS-HD MA 2.0 Language, English DTS-HD MA 2.0 Language, English Subtitles, Introductions, Japanese Promos, Japanese TV Spots, Clean Opening Animation, Clean Closing Animation
Content Grade: B+
Audio Grade: A-
Video Grade: A
Packaging Grade: B+
Menu Grade: B
Extras Grade: B+
Released By: Sentai Filmworks
Release Date: September 19th, 2023
MSRP: $69.98
Running Time: 374 Minutes
Video Encoding: 1080p AVC
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1 Widescreen
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Sony PlayStation3 Blu-ray player via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
