2015, 12 episodes:
AniDB
Schoolgirls with the spirit of WWII Japanese fighting ships take on an
alien navy.
Kantai Collection
is a popular Flash game in Japan, basically a combination of
lightweight naval wargame with Pokemon-style choosing and upgrading of
combatants.
The premise fundamentally makes no sense, and is never explained. Do
the girls take on the spirits of the ships, or are they the spirits
of the ships now given human form? We don't know, and it doesn't
matter, because this is basically a war story; life begins at the
naval base, which is a combination of school and base of operations.
The personalities of the various girls are loosely inspired by the
ships they represent; the notoriously fuel-hungry Akagi is shown as
a glutton, Hibiki (historically turned over to the Russians after
WWII) mostly just says "хорошо", Kongō (built at Barrow-in-Furness)
throws English words into her speech, Yamato is kept out of the
fighting until the desperate final battle, and so on. The enemy is
even less explored: they're drawn as some sort of organic tech, all
hard shells and teeth, but some of them seem to incorporate human or
human-like components. Does that mean anything? Who knows?
Of course there are some people who like to think that this show
heralds a right-wing shift in Japanese politics and a return to
militarism. Yeah, right. They said the same things about Space
Battleship Yamato.
The show mixes school and off-duty life (Fubuki, a new destroyer, is
the viewpoint character) with battle sequences, when the girls wear
ship-like accessories (smoke stacks, bridge wings, turrets and so on)
and skate across the surface of the sea. Because, well, why not? The
carriers' decks are arm-guards, and they're dressed as traditional
Japanese archers; they launch aircraft by firing arrows which turn
into planes in the air. (It's episode seven before we see a plane
returning to a carrier.) The Admiral, the player's avatar in the
game, is never seen.
If you've seen war-story anime before there's nothing particularly new
in the plot (though the final episode does perhaps have rather too
many instances of reinforcements turning up to save the day), but the
equipment designs are lovingly researched, and everything's
competently done. For my taste there are rather too many characters,
but the game has more than a hundred, and there was probably pressure
to include as many as possible.
A second season is being made, probably for broadcast in the Autumn
2015 slot.
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