Director: Hiroyuki Imaishi
Screenplay: Atsushi Nishigori,
Hiromi Wakabayashi, Hiroshi Seko, Hiroyuki Imaishi, Masahiko Otsuka, Shigeto
Koyama, Shin Itagaki
Voice Cast: Arisa Ogasawara as
Panty, Mariya Ise as Stocking, Ayumi Fujimura as Kneesocks, Hiroyuki Yoshino as
Briefs, Kōji Ishii as Garterbelt, Miki Makiguchi as Fastner, Shigeru Chiba as
Corset, Takashi Nakamura as Chuck, Yuka Komatsu as Scanty
Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles
Note to the viewer, alongside some possible spoilers this reviewer has
decided to fit a tone appropriate for this series of having more than usual
amounts of swearing in the review text. Be assured this isn't going to end in a
childish joke where every sentence is full of unnecessary cussing, as I get
tired of that in other peoples' work, but considering how much voice actresses Arisa Ogasawara and Mariya Ise swear, it felt the perfect
tribute whilst still writing a constructive review. For any new readers, this
isn't common in other reviews, just for the joke here. Also as a result this
isn't a review suitable for children to read, but anyone who lets their
children see this show are bad parents anyway.
After frankly a few major duds, let's
get back track with oodles of profanity, shit and other bodily functions, all
whilst having flashbacks to watching Cartoon
Network shows like Johnny Bravo
in my childhood. It's an unpredictable series, but fucking hell, with swearing
the only expectable language for a review of this late era Gainax production, profane and potty mouthed, Hiroshi Imaishi was a much needed kick up the arse for the company
wasn't he?
Starting with Dead Leaves (2004), a divisive
production, Imaishi however scored a
big hit with Gurren Lagann (2007), a
tribute to older giant robot shows, but Imaishi
really planted his flag in the business in the 2010s onwards, even though Gainax after this series wouldn't be the
recipient to this. Imaishi jumped
ship, and founded his own studio called Trigger,
getting another blockbuster under his belt in Kill La Kill (2013) and wowing everyone still. Starting the 2010s though,
he created thus divisive but well remembered tribute to American cartoons, one
that is still something to admire if you accept its cuss mouth and attitude.
The plot's simple - two angel
sisters are our protagonists, Panty Anarchy who is a proud nymphomaniac who
loves fucking, and her sister Stocking Anarchy who is a Goth Lolita who is a
sugar junky, and under the orders of a priest named Garterbelt they have to
defeat ghosts terrorising a city, the coins left destroying them to save up to
get back into Heaven. Throw in Chuck, a
dog-like creature with the capacity to survive being maimed (chopped up,
crushed under car wheels, obliterated etc.), and a male geek named Brief who
the sisters pick on, and this thirteen episode series is notably not plot driven
until the final two episodes. That vignette structure it is instead is clearly
influenced by Western animated shows from the late nineties from the likes of Cartoon Network, right down to episodes
being split into two smaller stories (or even more in one) baring the finale. It's
also crude and lewd, not a show that was successful with otaku but did get a
surprising popularity with female viewers and people wanting something
different.
Also, when I mean lewd, also
include proudly gross. It doesn't show a lot, and for all the English language
swearing from voice actresses as the leads, it actually censors language spoken
in Japanese. No, the thing is that Panty
& Stockings.... goes for stuff that's crude and shocking even for a TV
show that has to follow certain rules still. The first story, for the first
episode is upfront with this by having a shit monster as the first ghost, and
they go through all the bodily fluids quite early on to the point running out
of matter to get to. And yes, they even get to semen when, challenging the
opening of Ozamu Tezuka's 1970 manga Apollo Song when sperm where depicted
as humanoids in a race to the death, all here by having them part of a Saving Private Ryan D-Day landing
parody, with spunk soldiers on mass to the doomed mission ahead. There's isn't
bodily humour as I remember, but that's because it's literally expended with in
the first quarter.
Beyond that is that it's a show
about anti-heroines who you eventually love, Panty proudly sleeping with many
men, Stockings more elegant but easier to piss off and a visibly masochistic
streak, the duo in the centre of numerous deliberately tasteless jokes. One running
joke has not aged well, that Garterbelt really likes young boys, an
uncomfortable tinge nowadays to revisit, but it cannot be denied that, even in
the restrictions of television anime, this went for broke in profaneness.
Rarely does one encounter a show which has motherfucker proudly spoken unless Manga Entertainment dubbed it in the
nineties with additional swearing in the English dub.
The energy is felt in that, in
tribute to Western animation, the unique look is much simpler in design but
means the animation can be incredibly kinetic and has movement. It was a huge,
amazing surprise to realise how taking a very different direction to most
Japanese animation, more detailed designs usually used with limited movement,
leads to incredible set pieces for what is meant to be a comedy. Action based,
Panty's namesake clothing able to be turned into guns, Stocking's into twin
swords, when the series ramps these scenes up they have a level of artistic
spectacle even I, someone who finds most live action films dull, admire as the
style used even allows the animators to use camera movements that would be
insanely difficult to try in a more detailed art style. The best examples of
this are in Episode 1, already showing its hand how well made it is by having a
prolonged vehicle chase/action scene for one story with a speed demon ghost
(even involving a train and police car crashes to top The Blues Brothers (1980)), and Episode 6, which introduces their
arch nemesis, two demon sisters Scanty and Kneesocks, who eventually go to
cartoon show evil schemes but have a drag out fight/shootout in a high school
for the finale.
The music is also fucking
incredible. The production hired Taku
Takahashi, a hip-hop recording artist/DJ/record producer as the musical
director, who career started in the late 90s and can draw from his experience
with all the artists he collaborated with for this soundtrack, their synth and
electropop tracks created as a result a unique collect, a spectacular and poppy
energy that's better than a lot of pop used in anime. Alongside producing earworms
- not just the opening and ending credits music, but the song D City Rock which gets introduced later
- it's as dynamic as the show itself, always going for broke and varied to a
great extent without a sense of it being repetitive unless its key motifs.
So much of why I admire the
series is that, even if ideas failed or weren't as funny as expected, the show
was individuals allowed to be experimental and bold even in the name of absurd
humour and toilet jokes, even in the fact that when ghosts are defeated they
cut to live action, filming a model of them that was built just be blown up
with explosives on a model set. The production team was visibly having a whale
of a time on the production, but all with a sense of creativity that even the
tasteless jokes have more whit to them, like the deadpan nature of semen
soldiers going forth to their death that is played tonally seriously. Even for
the puke ghost, it lead to the hiring of Osamu
Kobayashi for that segment, director of BECK: Mongolian Chop Squad (2004-5), a very idiosyncratic figure
who made a very divisive early episode of Gurren
Lagann; his segment here is actually one of the best, if you want a fucking
bleak tale drawn, with realistic character designs, of a downtrodden old salary
man living a depressing useless life, all with the lead heroines (drawn in
their normal style) only appearing near the end.
Helping the series as much is the
Japanese voice cast. Listening to the English dub a little, it's too broad and
exaggerated, missing the point entirely. Arisa
Ogasawara and Mariya Ise, cussing
like sailors as Panty and Stocking respectfully, are incredibly and arguably
two of the only people who have managed to make English curse words like fuck
being used in between Japanese dialogue work without feeling tonally wooden,
mainly because they make these crass characters credible with nusicane even as
broad stereotypes. (Tragically Ogasawara's
CV isn't large in the slightest, in contrast to Ise who has done a lot and even a big of theme song vocals). Too
many individuals stand out here, even with the guest actors standing out, such
as the voice of the underwear eating ghost who's magnificently fabulous in his
vocal delivery. Personally returning to this series after so long, I also adore
Takashi Nakamura as Chuck, just for
the absurdity of having to play an animal mascot who can only say his name over
and over again, managing to make this work. When a lovely little twist is
revealed in the final episode, of him being actually a badass, it's fucking hilarious
and pays off as Nakamura has had to
spend the series, even in his segments as the star, just saying
"Chuck" over and over as a figure usually kicked around and maimed.
The bravery of the show means it
takes risks that, even if they don't necessary succeed, you have to admire the
big fucking brass balls when many anime series play it safe, something a
testament to Hiroshi Imaishi as an
auteur anime director as this is reoccurring throughout his career. An entire
story that is a parody of the original 1980s American cartoon series of Transformers springs to mind, the "Generation
1" series one that Japanese viewers would know of as it got popular enough
in Japan to have Japanese exclusive series being produced afterwards. It
clearly throws in constant references to the old work, but still manages to be
funny as a story of the lead sisters' arguments getting into being giant robot
on robot skirmishes, whilst managing to get away with explicit Transformer on
Transformer sex with mechanical genitals.
Probably the most ambitious are
the two episodes just before the two part finale, Episode ten multiple
mini-stories, from ones entirely about Chuck to a music video that parodies
everything from The Beatles to the Gorillaz, a nice throwback as I've
always suspected Imaishi's debut Dead Leaves was aesthetically
influenced by Jamie Hewlett, the
character designer of the Gorillaz
and co-creator of the comic series Tank
Girl. Episode Twelve meanwhile has on exceptional segment entirely shot in
a lounge with only a couple of edits, animated long takes of just characters
getting hungry.
To be honest, after this the
weakest episodes are the last two of the series because trying to write serious
plotted stories for this material and wrap everything up is fucking ridiculous.
Plot threads like Panty suddenly becoming a virgin again doesn't make sense
even for the show's absurd logic, and being structurally like a Cartoon Network animation for most of
its length, but only thirteen episodes long, does make the shift utterly out of
place. What succeeds is nonetheless inspired in spite of this obvious problem -
it includes the only justifiable compilation of old episode clips I have seen
so far in an anime, as its used to push a plot point, and the ending escalates
to the best of insane scales, even having effectively a Monty Python moment if significantly more sensual.
Then the series fucks with the
viewer with the infamous Gainax ending,
and even if I had not gone for the joke of adding more swearing into this
review, this would be the one time I could justify this verbal choice, all
because this is the first Gainax
ending I have had to talk about, and they
are infamous for a good reason. Gainax
at some point developed a reputation for shows which abruptly curveball in
tone, usually at the ending rather than what, say, Gurren Lagann does with juggling tones throughout, to the point this
infamous trope became a trademark. Neon
Genesis Evangelion (1995), their most famous work, is the most well known
example of this concept too, as this morally and psychologically complex giant
robot show suddenly ended in its final two episodes with a vague and
avant-garde journey into its lead character Shinji finding his self confidence,
by way of being represented by a school hall with chairs than apocalyptic robot
fights. It ended up pissing audiences off so much that director Hideaki Anno got death threats1. The
Gainax ending here in Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt,
with the most abrupt heel turn taking place in the last minutes, is clearly
meant to be ridiculous and funny, made even more a trolling of the fans as the
show ends on "To Be Continued..." actually being on the screen.
Sadly over the 2010s, no sequel
was made even if it was hinted at. Imaishi
as mentioned would leave Gainax in 2011, this last directorial effort for them.
Gainax themselves hasn't done
particularly well. They were kings in the nineties, a studio created by anime
fans in the early eighties who once had to reuse animation cels just to make
amateur work, only to have titles like Royal
Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise (1987) to Neon Genesis Evangelion under their belt. A lot of the problem is
that three-quarters of their titles after the 2000s, baring this or FLCL (2000-1) or something that is divisive
like Diebuster (2004-6), are unknown
or tainted with feeling as if they were catering with fetishes of a fan base,
not a lot of their series from a certain period with exceptions ones you might
have heard of. Monetary problems have not helped, as it's been sadly chronicled
that even in 1999 in their height Gainax
president Takeshi Sawamura and tax
accountant Yoshikatsu Iwasaki were
arrested and jailed for fraud. Evangelion
exists more as the project of Anno's
own studio Khara nowadays as he
started the Rebuild of Evangelion
films in the late 2000s, with Anno
even suing his old company for unpaid royalties, and to make things worse representative
director Tomohiro Maki was arrested
on allegations of sexual indecency on an aspiring voice actress in December
2019, the later an awful black mark to a company that over the Millennium would eventually be battered,
crushed and dragged through into public for scandals like this last one. Only a
threat of a sequel of The Wings of Honnêamise seems to catch my interest and
I don't know if that's even going to happen or if I want to witness it.
And Imaishi himself? Well, Kill
La Kill was huge and Promade (2019)
had struck a chord with viewers in its theatrical release, so in contrast he
had a fucking good decade which he deserved, as alongside Masaki Yuasa never was there a man who earned got a great decade of
success in ten solid years, and all with the sense he's a talented one-off we
are glad to have and who earned it. And yes, returning to Panty & Stockings with Garterbelt in this long and profanely
written review, when its good its fucking glorious.
=========
1) Probably the best for me to
represent the Gainax Ending however
is This Ugly Yet Beautiful World (2004),
a pretty generic sci-fi show of a guy protecting an alien girl for the most
part whose most striking feature was that the fan service got to the point of
actually drawn nudity from the get-go. Suddenly in the final episodes, everything
changes and with no fucking hesitance in spoiling it, as the swearing will be
found here in these notes as much as the main review, it the princess was
revealed to be the destroyer of the Earth with everything going apocalyptic. It
was even back then a show in my early young adult years I found average, only for
that ending to be so surprising that the show's still stayed in memory.
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