War Witches, Part 3 - Strike Witches II

WAR WITCHES

~part 3~

Strike Witches II

Season 2 produced by AIC Spirits for the Summer 2010 season
Movie produced by AIC for release in March of 2012

Six months have passed since Gallia was liberated from the Neuroi by the Strike Witches of the 501st Joint Fighter Wing. Our brave heroes have disbanded on the precipice of peace. Back in Fuso, aspiring medical doctor Yoshika Miyafuji prepares herself for the next steps of her education. The last line of Witches have been dispatched to meet with the remaining Neuroi nest in Venezia to etch the final days of war into stone. If only it could be so easy. Right as humanity is poised to embrace the calming relief of peacetime, a massive roadblock suddenly comes into view. The faction of Neuroi that successfully communicated with humans is abruptly wiped out by a much larger colony that clearly has no desire to settle for less than complete domination over the planet and its inhabitants. Europe is once again under siege as Francesca's home country becomes the next front of the conflict. The embers of the 501st Joint Fighter Wing begin to stir once again...

Just a mere two years after its debut, the series transitioned from studio Gonzo to AIC Spirits, one of the many production teams under the AIC banner. It was there that Strike Witches 2 was born to continue the adventures of our high-flying heroines as they push back against the growing Neuroi threat while having a little fun along the way. Yes, it's business as usual at the Strike Witches' home base. With the return of series director Kazuhiro Takamura and many of the staff members that worked on the first season, Strike Witches 2 looks almost indistinguishable from its predecessor. It's yet another reminder that the staff on a project is more defining of its quality than a studio's reputation. A smidgen of elbow polish and a noticeable increase of CG shots during the flying sequences are all that separate this visually from the material we've talked about so far. 

To say that Strike Witches 2 is bringing anything shocking and new to the table would be an exercise in dishonesty. This series very much prides itself on having an established formula and deviates negligibly from the first season's blueprint. I'm a firm believer that you can't have too much of a good thing. What makes this format stick largely comes down to the cast itself. With nearly a dozen characters that have dynamic personalities and a wide range of nationalities, the writers are able to play around with episode concepts and different pairings while sticking to the template. It's not unlike the peak of western animation which largely favored episodic experiences in between its climactic bookends, beholden to the status quo as they were. By establishing a clear end goal, the creative minds are uninhibited by meager plot devices as they deliver what the viewers really want - antics and misadventures with their favorite witches. What else is there to do with an ensemble cast of moe military heroines in a world like this one? The soundtrack retains many of the recognizable compositions from the first season along with a brand new OP and ED that I personally prefer over the originals despite how iconic they are. The ED song also has several variations with different characters singing per episode as intended.

 

This time they're training to be real witches!

Once again, we begin our story in the peaceful island country of Fuso. Yoshika, now a proud middle school graduate, has gathered the resolve to seriously pursue enrollment at a medical school to carry on the tradition of her family clinic. While discussing the matter with her childhood friend Michiko, fellow Fuso witch Suwa Amaki comes crashing down behind the clinic in a scene that was foreshadowed at the end of the previous season. She delivers a mysterious letter from Yoshika's late father containing blueprints for a new striker prototype. Bewildered and seeking answers, Yoshika and Michiko head to the nearby naval base where Mio Sakamoto has been stationed as an instructor. Mentally burdened by her weakening powers, Yoshika's former commanding officer went into hiding to forge the cursed blade Reppumaru in a desperate bid to overcome her inability to raise a defensive shield in battle. In the process of delivering the blueprints to the naval base, Yoshika happens to overhear her comrade-in-arms Lynette Bishop reporting on the carnage in Venezia as the struggle against the Neuroi continues. Despite her pleas, Yoshika is unable to communicate with Lynne and is subsequently kicked off the base by Mio after returning from her leave.

The events of the first season clearly established that Yoshika doesn't take "no" for an answer once her heart and mind have jointly decided on a course of action. She quickly learns that Mio is boarding a flight to the newly built Strike Witches base near Romagna to continue the fight. With righteousness burning in her soul, Yoshika hijacks her old striker unit from storage and convinces the naval crew to help her launch. Fueled by her magic might and stubborn nature, she catches up to Mio's plane and informs her battle commander that she has no intention of being left behind. Even with her brooding vagabond demeanor, Mio can't resist Yoshika's infectious sense of justice and desire to help people. She helps Yoshika dismount her striker unit and the two Fuso witches ride together toward the front lines to continue their assault against the ruthless Neuroi forces. Slowly, the gravity of this new development pulls each member of the 501st Joint Fighter Wing back to their second home.

These first couple of episodes heavily mirror the original series debut, with Yoshika and Mio commuting to the base and being interrupted by a Neuroi threat before reaching land. The duo have to hold off the enemy long enough for the rest of the 501st to show up and provide the necessary support to take it down. From there, we get right into the thick of it with a heartfelt reunion as Commander Minna officially reforms the Strike Witches. Our established groups remain the same; the only major development is Perrine graduating from the pent-up bully to a loyal member of Team Yoshika alongside Lynne. Her admiration (to put it lightly) for Mio is still present but with far less intensity than previously expressed. Instead she serves as the haughty, easily embarrassed third wheel who secretly cares about Yoshika so much that in one episode she stalks her around the base. Perrine also receives a long overdue episode this season focusing on her anxieties over the restoration of Gallia after its liberation. This serves as a nice perspective on her empathetic nature and sense of responsibility toward her people as the daughter of a once noble family.

 

Yoshika remains vigilant as Mio brandishes her katana in the plane

Many of the episodic adventures sandwiched between the crust of the plot are expanded concepts from the first season. There's another training arc with Yoshika and Lynne, but this time Perrine gets to tag along as the trio is put through a grueling regimen by Mio's former mentor to better control their magic. True to their identity as witches, the girls have to master the art of flying on a broomstick in a montage that has one of the most recognizable depictions of cameltoe in anime history. Shirley's speed freak episode gets turned on its head as Barkhorn receives an experimental striker unit capable of supersonic acceleration with the steep cost of obliterating her magic reserves. This ends with a gag that involves Yoshika misidentifying striker engineer Ursula Hartmann, Erica's bespectacled twin sister, who shows up at the base to apologize for the faulty prototype. The comfy Eila and Sanya episode is more dramatic this time around as Yoshika unwittingly becomes the focus of Eila's ire after being chosen to defend Sanya during a mission to destroy a Neuroi obelisk in the stratosphere. Naturally, our heroine has a pure soul and switches places with Eila at the last minute so the two lovebirds can have their moment above the clouds.

The writers put in the work to ensure that any character who hadn't received their own episode got a cut this time around. Perrine's segment is a twist on the beach training camp that quickly pivots to a treasure hunt sequence in an underwater cave as she desperately seeks out wealth to help reconstruct a broken bridge that is preventing children in Gallia from attending school. Francesca and Erica both get their moment in the limelight in contrast with their roles as gag characters for the majority of the previous run. After playing the lazy overachiever for over a dozen episodes, Erica finally has to flex her talent in air combat when her former training school rival Hanna arrives at the base for an assault mission against the Neuroi. The latter half of the episode is an extended competition between the two that culminates in a heated dogfight with Erica seriously engaging to secure Hanna's autograph for Barkhorn. But perhaps the most emotionally resonant offering of the season goes to Francesca's supply trip to her home turf of Romagna. In an interesting deviation from the typical episode layout, very few of the other witches appear in favor of showcasing her misadventures with a local girl named Maria who is secretly the soon-to-be-inaugurated Duchess of the territory. It's a charming little story that showcases the duality of Francesca's childish nature with her genuine sense of duty to protect the homeland she deeply cherishes.

Of course, they still made room to solidify the tradition of the seventh episode with yet another nonsense premise that toes the line between plot and perversion. A small Neuroi bug sneaks into the base to siphon electricity for its host body but finds itself the subject of a feverish chase thanks to its habit of sneaking into women's underwear. Just about every witch on the base gets an embarrassing dose of "bug crawling in my panties" syndrome before Commander Minna executes it with her glutes of steel, earning herself a commemorative medal for two hundred confirmed Neuroi kills in the process. Kudos to whoever went to the effort of puzzling out how to include the monster-of-the-week element in this one while tuning the whole premise to be an even darker shade of shameless buffoonery than last time. There will be yet another episode seven adventure in the future, and you can rest assured knowing that it will plow even further into the fields of folly.

 

Romagna fashion has the hat game locked down

Yoshika and Mio retain their dominance over the major plot beats as they were largely unresolved up to this point. The purpose of the mysterious blueprints from her father becomes clear after Yoshika goes through a crisis where she struggles to fly despite her clean bill of health. Well, it turns out that our heroine's magic power is so immense that the basic striker units crumble at the mere force of her output! Thanks to the incredible foresight of her deceased father, a new striker prototype is tailor-made for her abilities and she's back in the air in no time. Meanwhile, poor Mio is suffering from the weight of her unwise decision to forge a cursed katana that sucks the magic power straight out of her like a vacuum when drawn from its sheath. Her hunger to create a killer finishing move to wipe out the Neuroi nest in one slice blinds her from the debilitating side effects. Yoshika becomes privy to this when she draws the blade out of curiosity and the sheer magic suction alone knocks her clean out. 

Minna is trapped dealing with the demands of military leadership while struggling to wrangle Mio away from working herself to death. Surely the top brass have learned something from the crisis that concluded the first season, right? No, they sure haven't! Unwilling to let the Strike Witches earn all the glory from liberating Venezia, these geniuses decided the best course of action was to fuse the battleship Yamato with Neuroi technology in a "fight fire with fire" approach to the problem. Thanks to the Neuroi's innate abilities of regeneration and flight, this allows the mighty ship to plot a course to ram itself into the nest and blast the thing to hell at point blank range. Naturally, Mio tries to avoid this by unleashing her ultimate strike, but her magic reserves are so thoroughly dried out that the blade just bounces out of her hands and finds itself sheathed in the deck of the Yamato. If that wasn't bad enough, the ship rams the nest but fails to keep the Neuroi dynamo powered long enough to deal the finishing blow. Realizing that she still has a chance to be useful, Mio risks it all to reach the battleship and sacrifices what's left of her dwindling magic reserves to power the cannon and wipe the nest clean off the face of the planet.

Too bad for them, because this only blasts the hive's dense hull open and fails to pierce the massive Neuroi core that powers the beast. Thanks to the Yamato's transformation, the hive is able to absorb the massive battleship into its being and imprisons Mio as a magic conduit to amplify its own power. It takes a Fuso witch to clean up a Fuso witch's mess, so here comes Yoshika with the might of the 501st backing her up in formation. With all the cover fire keeping her unscathed, our heroine is able to reach the deck of the Yamato to release the Reppumaru from its prison. She then unleashes the proverbial god slaying katana blast attack that was highly forbidden for her to use. This turns the Neuroi nest into fine dust particles and saves Mio from being dried into a husk by the enemy, but the raw energy cost from the attack completely dissipates any trace of magic from Yoshika's body. With the liberation of Romagna and Venezia, the 501st yet again disbands. Our plucky lead returns to Fuso to pursue a new life as a medical school student now that she can never again channel her witch power. I suppose Strike Witches will now become a super powered medical drama. Yoshika's Anatomy, perhaps? Yoshika M.D.?

 

Yoshika getting a triumphant hug from Lynne is a season finale tradition

Believe it or not, her story isn't over just yet. With two more years of effort, AIC's main production studio ran it back with the feature length Strike Witches the Movie in 2012. This film serves as an extended epilogue of the second season and takes place just a mere two months after the destruction of the Neuroi nest over Venezia. One would expect this to be an even more bombastic and action-packed experience than the television series, but to my surprise it subverted the established formula quite a bit more than I remembered. What we have here is essentially a "road trip gone wrong" premise swaddled in the cloth of traditional Strike Witches characteristics. Still in the process of adapting to life without magic, Yoshika nearly has a fatal plunge off the edge of a waterfall during a botched puppy rescue but is snatched up in the nick of time by newbie Fuso witch Shizuka Hattori. To her surprise, Yoshika learns that she has been accepted to a prestigious medical school in Helvetia (basically Switzerland) and that Shizuka has been tasked with escorting her there with a study visa. Of course, the journey will be anything but smooth sailing as the duo runs into crisis after crisis in the pursuit of Yoshika's educational future.

What I enjoy most about this film are the little vignettes along the way that focus on specific sets of characters. With the 501st disbanded all its members spread out across the globe, the writers wasted no time having fun cooking up little situations here and there for each group. It was also a prime opportunity to better showcase the greater World Witches franchise as a whole with characters from the non-anime side material, some of which would go on to appear in later anime spin-offs such as 2016's Brave Witches. The television series could only flirt with these elements due to the necessity of keeping the setting locked to the 501st base and its surrounding areas, but that restraint was lifted with the film's premise revolving more around travel and fleshing out the world than ever before. The balance of antics and war drama remain consistent with the material we've seen so far. Shirley and Francesca go from racing gondolas on the Venezian waters with Romagna's 504th to fending off an unforeseen Neuroi threat. Later, Yoshika and Shizuka meet up with Lynne and Perrine in Gallia to help look after the local war orphans before coming to the aid of villagers near the Rhine who have been trapped by a landslide.

The major crux of the story remains firmly with the dynamic between the two Fuso girls and their journey. Shizuka is a starstruck admirer of Yoshika solely due to the feats she accomplished with the Strike Witches, but quickly becomes disillusioned after meeting the person behind the legend. These two girls couldn't be more diametrically opposed in their ideologies. Shizuka is a textbook soldier who treats military decorum as law to a nearly religious degree and experiences deep frustration toward those who disregard orders on any level. Yoshika is the kind of person who would set fire to the whole rulebook if it obstructed her sense of justice and goodness to any degree of inconvenience. This is clearly illustrated early in the story during their initial departure on the Amagi battle-cruiser. A collision with an iceberg causes the ammo storage to catch fire and traps a crew member inside. Faced with certain death after the sprinkler system fails to activate, an emboldened Yoshika defies the captain's orders and uses every ounce of strength to help the trapped crew member activate the sprinklers so he can be dragged to safety. Shizuka is not impressed; in fact, she's absolutely livid with Yoshika's flagrant disregard for decorum. This serves as the wedge between the two girls and the main source of interpersonal conflict. As their journey continues, Shizuka struggles more and more to understand Yoshika while meeting her comrades along the way.

 

Shizuka is NOT amused with Yoshika's ramune offer

A slowly building Neuroi threat creeps into the narrative surrounding the journey which pulls the Karlsland group back into the fray. Minna has Barkhorn and Erica scope out the enemy yet are unable to contain them. The communications jamming effect of the Neuroi prevent Yoshika and Shizuka from realizing the impending danger before they are stopped in their tracks by the enemy appearing in a nearby village. Casting away her stubborn nature, Shizuka jumps into battle without orders while Yoshika helps evacuate the villagers. Unfortunately, this newbie witch jobs so fiercely that Yoshika has to bait one of the Neuroi units away with their utility vehicle and then, without a drop of magic in her bones, sends it flying off a ramp into the enemy like a Jackass stunt and manages to finish it off with her gun during the chaos. Then she gets hit by a laser and fucking DIES. Thanks to her impressively thick plot armor, she cheats death but endures a nasty flesh wound. This leaves the struggling Shizuka with no choice but to fly the hell out of bounds and plead for help over the shaky comm lines. The unstoppable, immovable power of friendship allows her cries to pierce the airwaves and alerts every member of the 501st to their plight. You think I'm kidding? Every single member shows up, and while they're throttling in the direction of Yoshika's near lifeless body, their voices reach her soul and coax the dormant veins of magic back to life. Even Mio comes in cruising on a biplane to airdrop Yoshika's striker unit into the jaws of conflict. With her powers burning bright, Yoshika erases her wounds with ease and launches into battle to shred the Neuroi units and their lead carrier with her comrades. An insurmountable "it's over" triumphed by an invincible "we are so back".

The film ends with the 501st Joint Fighter Wing reforming like clockwork to prepare for the next wave of the Neuroi assault. Shizuka finally comes to terms with Yoshika's justice and learns to chill out a little. She has to serve as Mio's replacement, after all! How can the 501st go on without two Fuso witches as its backbone? This is actually a tiny spoiler as Shizuka's enlistment to the Strike Witches isn't confirmed until much later, but I think it's pretty obvious they didn't build her entire character profile in the movie just for her to be a one-and-done appearance. This story concludes what I like to call the "first phase" of the World Witches anime experience and segues right into a stretch of spinoffs and side material. The proper third season continuation known as Road to Berlin would take eight long years after Strike Witches the Movie to finally materialize on television. In that time, three main pillars of work kept the series alive. The first is the movie's prequel OVA series, Operation Victory Arrow, that further expands on the events that took place in the two month gap between the conclusion of season 2 and the film. The second is the direct spinoff series Brave Witches that follows the 502nd Joint Fighter Wing and a brand new cast of characters. Both of these were produced at Shin Oonuma's studio SILVER LINK and will be the main subject of the next War Witches post. The final pillar is the deformed comedy spinoff known as 501 Butai Hasshin Shimasu! (501st Joint Fighter Wing Take Off!). It's a monument of unfiltered stupidity and low brow humor captured in half-length episodic increments and capped off with a thirty minute "movie" that I've admittedly never seen. We'll get to talking about that one at a later date.

It's genuinely impressive how consistent across the board Strike Witches is from a qualitative standpoint between its first two seasons and the film. Generally, people expect anime movies to be a noticeable step up in visual direction and execution, but Strike Witches the Movie is more like a long episode with five-to-ten percent more spice in the action sequences than the usual fare. To me, that's not a bad bargain at all. It would've been interesting to see AIC continue shepherding the series forward, but their sudden production implosion in 2014 made than an impossibility. Needless to say, most of the key players who helped bring this series to life ended up sticking around, so perhaps there wouldn't be much of a difference either way. It's just a passing thought.

 

Shizuka hitching a ride home on Mio's biplane

Next time, we'll discuss how well SILVER LINK did with witches old and new in their brief stint with the franchise. It'll be the last time this series had a consistent studio for more than one production cycle - a harbinger of its late stage era of which its fate remains uncertain. But that's a topic for another time. Until then, stay moe, friends. 

 

Get down, Yoshika's going postal!