The year is 1939. Rather than the Earth we know this is an Earth in an alternate reality... Where the global land mass looks quite different and magic flows like electricity... Humanity was attacked by a mysterious alien force known as the Neuroi. Armed with devastating power and hostile intentions they push humanity to the brink of destruction... And its there that they encounter the Witches a global force of female magicusers who fly through the air with the help of the newly invented Striker Unit carrying guns as large as them to destroy the enemy of their people. One such witch young Yoshika Miyafuji the daughter of the man who invented the striker unit is thrust into the conflict when she joins the 501st joint fighter wing also known as The Strike Witches All she wants is to help people to the best of her ability and with immense magical potential inside her shell stop at nothing to prove that defending mankind against the Neuroi runs in her family. The first season of Strike Witches... And only the first season due to budget issues... Was produced by Studio Gonzo a name you may have come to associate with a high level of inconsistency in the budgets of their works. They produced beautiful works of art that either had a high budget or a modest budget that knew how to use it and theyve produced stiff looking garbage that would barely pass for an independent ONA. As luck would have it Strike Witches is on the better end of the spectrum. The story is mostly split between exciting aerial combat and slice of life stories taking place at the base... Think Tanya the Evil but without all the backstabbing and political intrigue... so it was pretty easy for Gonzo to split the budget and I dont just mean in two ways. I mean in four ways. First you have the content taking place at the base. The animation is fairly cheap here for the most part but its well directed and framed so the lack of money never really holds it back. The immersive lighting and highlydetailed backgrounds carry the visuals in a lot of static shots. When the action on base does need to kick up for whatever reason they switch over to a brokenmodel style of animation that never really looks good in any anime but its used sparingly here. As for the battle animation the blend of 3D and 2D animation is damn near immaculate. The Neuroi are exclusively rendered in 3D which fits their design perfectly but CG is also used for far off shots of ships and the witches themselves. There are multiple shots where a 3D witch in the distance flies towards the camera and becomes 2D so smoothly that you can hardly say you noticed the transition. The character designs are bright colorful highly distinctive and instantly memorable. There are a few areas where the level of detail felt excessive... Closeup panty shots that can get a might uncomfortable frankly... But aside from that its all put to good use. The music was produced by the legendary Seikou Nagaoka who imbued it with a high energy uplifting military sound full of trumpets and drumroll accompaniment. Id like to specifically call attention to Striker no Hishou possibly the most iconic piece of music from the show outside of the main themes. Its heartpounding fistbumping triumphant victory music that plays quite a bit throughout the series. The opening To Do What I Can was sung by Yoko Ishida of Ah My Goddess fame and its from the perspective of Yoshika meaning it carries a dose of her positive and hopeful outlook within it. Ive said it before and Ill say it again Strike Withces has one of my favorite English dubs of all time. The cast is made up of Funimations past stars future stars and a handful of names that didnt stick around for too long but more impressive are the two names the producers had to reach out for... Stephanie Sheh who has never really been a Funimation actor was pulled in from this project to play against her normal type... Not the softvoiced waifs she usually plays but a toughasnails hardass with the best of intentions. They even called upon Kira Vincent Davis an actor from Texas who had largely retired three years prior after the downfall of ADV Films but this particular job seemingly reignited the spark of her career. Relatively new to the business Cherami Leigh had only received a few lead roles prior to playing Yoshika and her performance here was nothing short of starmaking. Her character is young enthusiastic and sincere and she holds nothing back with her portrayal. Some of these casting choices were perfectly natural... Jamie Marchi playing a loud outgoing redhead while her best friend Trina Nishimura played her snarky impish loli counterpart... Jad Saxton playing the stuckup tsundere while young Kate Bristol played the shy girl with low self esteem... Anastasia Munoz plays the commander of the squadron an exceptionally mature character whos motivated by a wealth of painful experiences for Munoz to explore... Caitlin Glass and Jennifer Forrester perfectly matching the awkward yet comfortable chemistry of a pair of ambiguous love interests... And Luci Christian who can play basically anything flexing her versatility by playing a lazy easygoing slob. Put it all together with an adaptive script thats both respectful and charming while occasionally letting certain actors improvise and in my opinion its just a joy to listen to and I highly recommend it. If youve never heard of Fumikane Shimada you have at least seen his work before. A professional illustrator and character designer hes been a highly influential figure in Japanese media especially in the sub genre of Mecha Musume IE turning inanimate objects into moe waifus. Yep it sounds weird on paper but in practice... Well its still weird but where theres an audience weirdness can still flourish. If youre familiar with any piece of Japanese media that involves girls either using or being military equipment such as Kancolle Busou Shinki and even the critically acclaimed Girls Und Panzer it came straight from his mind. Originally printing his design concepts in certain hobbyist magazines some of which were made into figurines by Toranoana and Konami his work quickly caught the eye of the anime world. After some success with the JC Staff anime Sky Girls he would work with Studio Gonzo on a project that was more ambitious and fleshed out... And batshit insane. Now imagine youre an anime director and youve been instructed by the studio to create a series around these elaborate sketches of halfnaked waifus with animal ears on their heads jet engines on their legs and giant fucking guns in their hands. What the hell are you supposed to do with that? Well if you answered take it completely seriously and pour your heart into the product then congratulations youve come up with the same answer as series director Kazuhiro Takamura. All things considered Strike Witches didnt deserve to be directed and paced as well as it is the series exists primarily to flash you with enough panty shots to make Najika Blitz Tactics blush and here Takamuras using every visual trick in the book to make sure you feel for these characters in every situation they get into with a wide array of techniques. But as amazing as the production values and direction may be theyre not what makes this series special. Plenty of ecchi shows are well made from a technical standpoint but if theres one thing Strike Witches has that elevates it above most shows of its ilk its the characters. I recently tried watching Kancolle and I couldnt do it... None of the characters stood out to me and halfway through they had blended together so much in my head that I barely knew three of their names all of which Ive forgotten. In Strike Witches the focal point of the series is on Yoshika Miyafuji and she is one hell of a likeable protagonist. Shes earnest and sincere she has strong values and beliefs she wants to help people as much as possible and her main character status gifts her with an excess amount of magic potential and the ability to heal others... But shes also not a marysue. The plot makes no effort to hide how inexperienced and naive she is and she develops in confidence throughout the story. She has a unique dynamic with every one of her main costars even if her interactions with a couple of them are relatively small this season and not all of them are positive. There are witches she respects or looks up to some she follows orders from or tries to learn more about... And one or two she butts heads with because she is surprisingly not a pushover. If sheor someone else is being treated unfairly shell speak up. Start talking shit to her she gets mad over it. If she were in any other anime shed be one of the better shonen protagonists. The rest of the cast arent all quite as strong a presence as Yoshika... Out of the ten of them only Mio Sakamoto really comes close to her level of prominence... But theyre all unique theyre all interesting and theyre designed just differently enough to stand out from each other at first glance. You might not like all of themI dont care for Francesca Lucchini myself but youll probably remember them all. Youll also feel a level of respect for them over the fact that they talk to each other using military titles rather than cutesy honorifics. Yoshika spends her time at the base interacting with each of them between battles and you get to know them all pretty well through her even if they dont get as much of a spotlight as the others. For example it doesnt take long at all to identify Erica Hartmann as a lazy savant the ace pilot with a massive kill count whos also completely unmotivated to do anything between battles other than sleep. She barely trains and her room is more clutter than space. We know all of that and yet she is probably the least prominent out of the entire main cast. It wouldnt be fair to say everyone got their own focus episode this season but Hartmann doesnt even come close tagging along with other characters stories and her biggest moment comes when shes maybe forty percent of the focus of episode 7 arguably the worst episode in the season. And shes on the low end of the scale The entire cast is explored to a point where you know who they are you know why they do what they do and some of them even have fairly tragic backstories. Theres little to no exposition throughout the narrative and every fight against the Neuroi is important in some way Either its related to the larger plot or its intended as the climax to someones character arc. There are some dumb plot points... Including a cliffhanger so stupid a character actually calls out how stupid it is in the cold open of the following episode... But considering the pedigree of this show theres way less idiocy than there probably should be. A little stupidity in a case like this is justified so why dont I give this show a perfect score? Speaking of which if I love this series and hold it in such high regard why do I call it a guilty pleasure anime? As long as I hesitated to review this title one I like and have a lot to say about there must be a really big elephant in the room. Elephant thy name is Fanservice. Now before I go any further I want to be clear about something: In a general sense I have no issue with fanservice. I do believe there are ways it can be used poorly see my Sankarea review for more info on that but for the most part I like nudity. I dont really talk about this much but one of the main reason I drifted towards anime when I was a teenager was because it was able to have nudity and it didnt have to be the strictly comedic strictly male double standard nudity of American adult animation. That was over twenty years ago but I still do generally have a soft spot for uncensored fanservice which is something Strike Witches has in spades... There was always going to BE fanservice with the series being based off Shimadas pervy designs but Gonzo upped the ante by avoiding your typical trappings like steam light beams and barbiedoll bodiesat least on the home release. Having said all that you may be surprised to hear that my biggest complaints with this series are in relation to the fanservice. First off lets take a look at the premise behind said fanservice. In order to use the Striker Unit to fight the Neuroi female magic users had to keep their legs bare. This led to them going pantsless around the base and in the five short years since then women globally have just stopped wearing pants. Its a fashion trend now. Where do I even begin with this? First off why didnt they just wear shorts? I get the fact that skirts would have been redundant but they make short pants for a reason. Since some girls get away with wearing swimsuits why dont they all wear leotards? Some of them wear panty hose okay so if thin fabric is okay why not opaque tights? How did the trend spread globally so fast and how did it not cause a ton of issues? Look I get the fact that creepers gonna creep no matter what you do but I have to imagine every woman on Earth walking around nearly bottomless wouldnt help the situation. And then you have episode seven the fanservice episode. Yes this fanservice series has a fanservice episode. The plot of this episode sees one of the girls misplacing her panties so she steals someone elses and that girl steals someone elses they chase each other around the base cringey hijinks ensue... Wait so are you seriously fucking telling me each girl only has one pair of underwear? Is that a thing were committing to? With the amount of fucking money theyre getting paid... And yes its canonically stated that the witches make a handsome chunk of change for their efforts... They only have one fucking pair of underwear each? They lose one oops guess they have to steal someone elses. I am sorry to harp on this so much but its such an obvious plot hole that the dub actors themselves called it out in a commentary track. Combine that with the reasoning behind the constant pantsu I dont even think early RWBY was this incompetent at worldbuilding. And of course theres the fact that out of all the uncensored nudity in this series most of it involves characters under the age of 18. This is a tricky situation to talk about but I guess I should start by saying that underage nudity in anime is nothing new. The Japanese dont have the same cultural taboos as we do and while uncensored nudity has become less common in the medium due to increased TV standards a characters age really hasnt played a factor in that. Our taboo in the western side of the world is well justified obviously there are very good reasons for it but from what I can tell Strike Witches seems to catch way more backlash from it than any other anime even though shows like Highschool DXD get away with way worse. What I will say in Strike Witches defense is that according to US law nudity thats not presented in an overtly sexual context is not considered pornography and with the exception of the occasional gropingI really dont like Francesca Lucchini the nudity in Strike Witches is completely casual. Characters bathe they frolic in the forest... One of them just canonically sleeps in the nude because thats how she rolls. There are far more critically acclaimed anime that are far more legally questionable than this... A certain so fucked up scene from End of Evangelion springs to mind in particular... But if its still a deal breaker for you I understand. I would actually recommend the spinoff series Brave Witches as a nonecchi Strike Witches alternative. Its not one of my personal favorites but its still pretty good you can watch it independently from the rest of the franchise and it isnt dullasshit like Kancolle. Strike Witches success spawned it a huge franchise and Funimation has been consistent about releasing that franchise stateside. There are three separate seasons to this show one that just finished and will be releasing early next year. Also available is a movie a pretty damn funny gag show called Take Off and the aforementioned nonecchi spinoff series Brave Witches. The sole exception is a 3 episode OVA cleverly titled Operation Victory Arrow which is the only entry in the franchise to not receive a stateside release. Several spinoff prequel and sidestory manga are available from Kodansha and a series of video games have yet to make the journey. Given its pedigree Strike Witches had every excuse in the book to not be as good as it is. For a dumb fanservice show built around an objectively stupid premise and based on a collection of pervy fetish artwork it vastly exceeds the sum of its parts. Its a simple story with no real depth and it operates more on emotion than logic but its more than exciting and unique enough to make up for it. What it cant make up for is just how far over the line it pushes its fanservice and the insanely idiotic logic that went into justifying all of it. I cant say Id recommend it to everybody especially due to its age rating but if it sounds like fun and youve been warned about everything that could be considered controversial about it Id say you should check it out. I give Strike Witches an 8/10.