I knew I'd be at least entertained, because veteran creator/director Tsutomu Mizushima knows how to make a fun anime. Girls und Panzer der Film is in some sense the Redline of tank combat. The entire latter half is a nonstop battle between a sprawling, cartoon cast and their mighty armored vehicles.

With $20M in the bank, it surpassed the Japanese box office earnings of Madoka: Rebellion, making it a force of otaku culture I knew little about. If anime of the past depicted the horror and pointlessness of war (Gundam) and promoted consumerism as the antidote to an ingrained war culture (Macross), Girls und Panzer goes a step further to abstract military combat from war itself.

With my disbelief suspended by the industrial power of a construction crane, the "way of the tank" is a bloodless and completely safe women's team sport, professionally organized and practiced in high school. Nevermind the live ammunition and urban destruction.

The ultimate basis of moe is idealized nostalgia; a return to youth, innocence, and a past that never really existed. Panzer is moe for doe-eyed children of course, but also for WWII-era armored vehicles and the quaint nationalism they evoke. The tank fetishism is thick. Each crew is a cartoon of their nationality. The English crew sips earl grey as they work, the proud Russians sing their native folk songs, and a Finnish girl strums her kantele mid-combat. The battle has them zipping across the named districts of an amusement park like Wild West Town and Nostalgic Japan Town.

It's a childish and hyper-sanitized rebranding of WWII, but that's the whole point. You can almost picture the hands of children gripping the tanks as they bound through the air and powerslide into the enemy: Vroom vroom! Kapow! Girls und Panzer is an otaku's tank playset.

There's an innocent joy to the tank-sport, purified of complexities like logistics, infantry, artillery, air, and more importantly, death, consequences and morality. Perhaps that's the natural endpoint of otaku culture's pacifist streak**, or perhaps it's merely the anime analog to the popular World of Tanks and War Thunder, which are just as innocent, glamorized and sports-like in their interpretation of WWII as Girls und Panzer.

** additional background info: