English Dub Season Review: Strike Witches: 501st JOINT FIGHTER WING Take Off! Season One

Striking is one word for it.

As if the several existing Strike Witches shows weren’t enough, they had to make sure to cram in one more for good measure. The OG Strike Witches anime is a magical, sci-fi war story about a universe wherein WWII, a bunch of aliens called Neuroi invaded — because obviously, WWII didn’t have enough problems. Since the Neuroi has a special type of alien technology, typical humans are unable to fight back against them. Naturally, the military decides to call upon the world’s witches to come clean up the mess.

Strike Witches is a unique anime. On the one hand, it does a fun salute to real-life pilots, who the characters are based on. On the other hand, it takes those pilots and turns them into — not just anime girls, but neko anime girls. Weird flex, but okay. It must have been doing something right, considering the number of movies and series the franchise has accumulated.

Which brings us to its most recent, chibi edition. Obviously, chibi shows are meant to be mindless fun — but was Strike Witches: 501st JOINT FIGHTER WING Take Off! mindless fun, or mindless fodder? Was it just created for the money, or was there some plot-related merit to seeing the girls get into random shenanigans?

Let’s review.

Animation/Art Style

Here’s the thing: we can sit here all day and critique the low frame-rate, compare it to the quality of the animation in the original series, and talk about how crudely drawn the characters are in comparison to that. But that’s the thing about chibi anime: what we see is what we get. No one goes into it expecting Van Gogh.

To give it at least some credit, though, certain (limited) creative choices made throughout the show definitely added some needed spice. For example, occasionally the characters would be surrounded by a different aesthetic (such as the Casablanca-esque movie-style presented in “501st, Time to Save Lives?”)

Like all anime, the title sequence and ending sequence have a much higher animation/style quality. Seeing the experimental crayon animation in the ending credits showed that it did have the capability to be more animated and stylistically fun than it was.

Plot

What plot?

A vast majority of the episodes are just comedic shorts — if anyone could even call most of it comedic. For Strike Witches fans, it may be funny to watch beloved characters go about mundane things, but there’s not much comedy other than that gimmick. There’s also loads of unnecessary fan service, which never fails to make things cringey.

The other grating thing is the way in which episodes were told. Most of them hopped around mindlessly from one plot to the next, without any cohesion to the other shorts. The show is so unfocused — save for the last two episodes, which center themselves on one plot. Speaking of which, the last episode throwing in an actual ending for the show was unexpected, considering that everything else had been filler. As far as narrative compliments go, though, that’s the end of it. At the end of the day, the entire show is just clickbait-y garbage.

Characters

They tried really, really hard to make sure that all the characters got a proper spotlight. There’s just too many of them for it to be possible in a show with a dozen episodes. However, they did have plenty of opportunities to switch gears onto other characters to make things more equal, considering that most of the episodes are just a bunch of random plots strung together. Instead, they focused mostly on Miyafuji, Barkhorn, Hartmann, and Shirley.

Shirley and Hartmann are pretty much the comedic backbones of the show, even though the show isn’t exactly funny in the first place. Miyafuji is weirdly perverted and Barkhorn seems to be one of the only characters with discipline. The quartet made for a good, balanced combination, but it would have benefited the fans to see more character combinations.

Sound Design

For the most part, the voice acting wasn’t really inspired. The characters had the tendency to fall into the, “sounds like a child” category. Even the characters who sounded more like adults (Minna comes to mind as an example) all sounded less like they were trying to convince the other characters they were older, and more like they were trying to convince the audience. Characters like Marseille were welcome because it was a notable change of pace to the ears. More variation on tone and inflection would be nice in general.

The music was pretty nice, at least — that ending song gives off similar vibes to old-school anime (although, the walk sequence definitely adds to that.)

Did it do its genre justice?

Counter question: how does one do “chibi anime” justice?

The fact of the matter is, this is a low-quality show in a big franchise. It’s designed to have fun and make money — that’s it. Chibi anime will never be a “main course” when it comes to storytelling. Strike Witches: 501st JOINT FIGHTER WING Take Off! is basically just dessert for fans — but it’s not even homemade dessert. It’s like…store-bought dessert. Not only is it a low effort chibi anime, but it’s commercial as hell.

Side-stepping the chibi genre for a moment — there is something additionally weird about the fact that Strike Witches — in general — is labeled as a Seinen anime (as in, targeted to an older male audience.) It’s usually bad news when a show with a very young (read: tweens and teens) cast of girls are being targeted to an audience that isn’t about them. Furthermore, the fact that Strike Witches: 501st JOINT FIGHTER WING Take Off! has so much fan service in it really does not look good for the show’s reputation. What exactly are they targeting, here? Not Neuroi, that’s for sure.

The only thing it does to encourage possible new Strike Witches fans into watching the main series is the soldier lessons at the end of every episode. Even then, though, there’s no reason for anyone who isn’t already a fan of the franchise to even watch.