This is another show I was really surprised at. Let’s face it, much like Love Live! this is a show about a girls-only high-school. I fully expected to shut it off after the first or second episode from an obscene amount of underwear and skin being flashed around. As I said, I was surprised. There was absolutely nothing improper in the show (as always, take this with a grain of salt – who knows if something happened while I looked away, but going through 12 episodes and never seeing anything is a good sign). The worse I ever saw is part of one of the episodes has most of the girls in their swim-suits washing the tanks to get them all cleaned up and ready for operation.

Girls und Panzer, that is Girls and Tanks, centers around a group of girls trying to save their school. Sound familiar? Seriously though, this story has absolutely no connection to Love Live! and a completely different story line. In Love Live! the issue was the school didn’t have enough students so unless they can get more prospective students interested, the school gets shut down. With Girls und Panzer, the school is going to be shut down – period. Basically the girls get the powers that be to agree that if they can win a tankery competition the school can stay open. Winning means beating every single other school participating, and oh yeah, they haven’t had a tankery program at their school in years.

What is tankery? Well, some schools have tennis, some have soccer, some have baseball and some? Well some have tankery! Tankery is the “sport” of tank warfare and learning to be proper girls through that sport.  Uhh, okay. So aside from that, the idea is pretty cool. You get two schools together with a bunch of tanks on each side manned by school kids. They go around a practice field (which includes the town, too bad if your shop gets blown up!) trying to disable the flag-tank of the other team.  And yes, they use live rounds!  Seriously though, there is no way tankery could actually exist without 80% of the participants dying each round. Even still, it’s kind of like paintball wars but with tanks. I’m thinking that would be a cool game to play!

That is basically the story. Can the girls manage to get all the way to the top and win? Beyond that, they build the characters up pretty well. The primary plot doesn’t develop much, but there are a few side plots that develop pretty nicely. In addition to that, they do some pretty cool “special effects” (if you can call it that in animation) in regards to the tanks, points of view, and creative ways of fighting tank vs. tank. I thoroughly enjoyed the show even though it felt pretty short (12 episodes).  I think there are actually 15, but 3 of them are “.5” episodes where they just rehash the past few episodes and introduce some of the new characters in more detail.