Product Description
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You may have heard of kung fu, but the girls at Oarai Academy
practice -fu - really, really big -fu, in fact. It's called
Tankery, and it's the martial art of operating armored tanks! And
even though the Tankery program at Oarai has been defunct for
years, the student council has taken a sudden interest in the art
and no one they set their s on is safe. Which is how Miho
Nishizumi, who transferred to Oarai specifically to stay out of
tanks, gets drafted to join the newly revived Tankery divison.
But it's not all bad, because joining her in Team Anglerfish are
her new found friends Saori, the highly receptive radio operator;
Hana, a flower arranger turned ner; Mako, their brilliant, but
chronically y driver; and combustible tank fangirl and
loader Yukari. They may not be on the half-track to fame and
fortune, and maybe some of them would rather shop for tank tops
than become tops in tanks, but once their focus is locked and
loaded, they're absolutely driven. It's mad, it's metal and
mayhem is guaranteed! It's GIRLS UND PANZER!
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The school adventure series Girls Und Panzer (2012) combines a
kawaii (cute) cast of teenagers with World War II-vintage tanks,
a juxtaposition even more incongruous than the big eyes/big
s/big s cliché. Shy Miho Nishizumi comes to Oarai Girls'
School because the curriculum doesn't include "tankery." Her
family has a long association with tanks, and her brittle older
sister has rejected Miho for sacrificing an interscholastic match
to save her teammates from drowning. But the Oarai student
council president adds the program, announcing that training for
amateur tank warfare makes girls "polite, graceful, modest, and
gallant." Miho and her friends, a standard array of anime girls'
school types, form the crew of one tank. To no one's surprise,
Miho's talents for planning strategy and commanding subordinates
lead to victories, first in intramural scrimmages, then in
contests with expensive, high-ranking academies. They fight on a
variety of terrains, all of them built onto a sort of aircraft
carrier the size of a large island. As Takaaki Suzuki, who served
as adviser on Strike Witches, also worked on Girls Und
Panzer, it's not surprising that the two series have a similar
feel. But Strike Witches was an inane fan service adventure set
in a British Neverland. Having characters praise a specific tank
model as a favorite of Rommel's or a key armament in the
Blitzkrieg may strike American viewers as tasteless, if not
offensive--as a series about the Enola Gay might offend Japanese
audiences. But Girls Und Panzer proved popular, generating a
novelization, a video game, and a manga adaptation, plus a
theatrical feature slated for 2014. The extras include two
programs of "Introductions," recycled footage of the characters
with some extra narration describing them. (Rated TV 14V:
violence, violence against women, nudity, potentially offensive
WW II and Nazi imagery) --Charles Solomon
(1. Tankery, Here It Comes! 2. Tanks, We Ride Them! 3. We're
Having a Match! 4. Captain Does Her Best! 5. Veterans of Their
Trade: Sherman Corps! 6. Our First Battle Comes to a Climax! 7.
Up Next Is Anzio! 8. We're Fighting Pravda! 9. Last Ditch Effort!
10. Classmates! 11. The Battle Gets Fierce! 12. The Battle We
Can't Back Down From!)