It's fall, and that means a new season of anime starting in Japan. This, of course, is bad news for me since anime is mostly a painful experience. However, every so often there is a gem hidden in the deluge of shit, and the only way to find it is to jump into the pile headfirst. This is how I found Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt.
Like finding a needle in a haystack that will give you herpes.
The subtley named Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is the newest production from famed studio Gianax, responsible for some of the most visually fantastic and over-the-top-awesome animes out there, including FLCL and Gurren Lagann. My hopes were high for this new series. First thing I saw was the art style. Distinctly American, I was immediately excited by its similarity to Powerpuff Girls and Samurai Jack, which blazed a trail with their unique art style.
America!
The show follows two fallen angels, Panty and Stocking on their quest to defeat evil ghosts and earn their way back to heaven. A more accurate description would be: Panty and Stocking hit stuff with their car, pose suggestively, and sometimes there are ghosts. The show revolves entirely around a single sex joke that is played out for the entire episode, and then at the end something blows up. And these aren't your run of the mill sex jokes- oh no. The third episode dealt entirely with the disappearance of tissues from the world, meaning men were unable to masturbate. The cause? Ghosts of the dead sperm destroyed the tissues as revenge. It included an extended sequence of a D-day like siege of sperm on vagina hill, and naturally ended with the two characters drenched in semen. I determined that I must be watching some sort of hardcore porn, only someone had painstakingly gone in and drawn clothes over all the characters.
The more I watched, the more strange things they seemed to focus on. Aside from paying special attention to sex, the show also gives us an episode on poop and makes a desperate attempt to include black people in it. Cheerleaders and football players, explosions, sex, a gay black man with an afro, and title cards that parodied movies like Fight Club and Pulp Fiction. I slowly began to realize. "Oh my god, this is what Japan thinks America wants to see." Indeed, the cartoon drawing styles and constant use of english phrases confirmed it. This show was aimed straight at America. What. I don't even. ugh.
Don't get me wrong. The show has some redeeming points. The music is a cool electro-club mix that suits the action well, and Gianax's animation talents are not wasted with some truly fantastic sequences.
This picture is indeed as awesome as it appears.
Even then, something terrible will come along and ruin the coolness. The animation direction is so schizophrenic watching it becomes a chore. Shots are often poorly planned out and leave your eye searching for a focal point in the chaos, a problem worsened by the bright colors and fast cuts. Every so often the style will change for comedic effect to a cutesy big headed version with so few frames actually drawn that the illusion of motion is completely ruined and your eyes strain to keep up. PaSwG is in general absolutely painful to watch, but at the same time I'm compelled to keep watching- a point which I think is perfectly illustrated in this clip, where the overly anime and awkward striptease begins, and just when I'm about to turn it off because I can't watch anymore, the style returns to that of a cartoon and the animation quality goes up tenfold.
WATCH HERE
Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt: 1 out of 5
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