GIRLS UND PANZER: TAICHOU WAR!

DESCRIPTION

CAST

MOVIE ActionGirls und Panzer: Saishuushou 4

REVIEWS

• 

  shirasesimp

  50/100
  A director's cry for help, masquerading as SoL

  In Taichou War, the commanders from various schools come together to discuss ideas on how to make youths more interested in Senshado.

  Lore-wise, it's irrelevant. No information is revealed that affects the movie's plot, and in particular Arisu is excluded from the cast here to avoid continuity problems. A few new character designs are introduced, but aren't given enough screentime to be more than talking-heads:

  

  Which is okay, because the blue-ray viewership of GuP is looking for more of the same old characters, rather than new exploration.

  Entertainment-wise, the OVA is fun character interaction fluff. Natural banter and cultural tropes are the mainstays of GuP, and this short addition to the series is no exception. After some pure verbal exploration of a live festival-like event, a series of intentionally bad video suggestions are played out, culminating in a short final cutesy tank dance that (in-canon) goes viral on a YouTube-like site.

  

  Taking it in at face value, the OVA is weird.

  The question and framing of, "the youth are losing interest in tanks; what can we do to garner interest?" makes no sense in-universe. Rejection of the parade for budgetary/location purposes makes even less sense when its been done several times in canon. And the final conclusion of a cutesy dance gone viral is one that fits more in real life than it should in a 2010s timestuck era anime.

  So, that ending, among other reasons, convinced me of something: most people missed the actual point of the OVA.

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  Taichou War is a fluff wrapper around a serious question: how do you invite public young interest into Senshado, and by extension the Girls Und Panzer franchise, in the modern day?

  Almost every anime series that's dragged on for a decade, dogged on by a loyal audience, thinks about some form of the question, eventually. The most popular titles in the public consciousness are never older than 3 years at best, for simple human reasons of attention fatigue and shifting taste. Many franchises try to take their cake & eat it by forking the series into separate spin-offs, with minimal canonical overlap, but it doesn't look like the writer here has that goal, and it's also often just botched (by stupidly advertising and tying in to the franchise in ways that leave newcomers detached).

  The OVA doesn't have a meaningful answer to the hard task. It has the same dream any other anime team has: sudden, inexplicable, nonsense virality. くだらない。

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  For better or for worse, it doesn't look as if any public commentary noticed the underlying purpose of the OVA, much less thinking up of answers to the actual question.

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