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Ever since Phillip K. Dick penned The Man in the High Castle, it seems that World War II has been a special target of alternate history writers. This tradition has been carried on in anime in a big way, to the point that anime that remix themes from World War II represents a sizeable sub-genre. Let’s examine five times WWII was repurposed in anime!
Strike Witches
Back in the 2000’s illustrator Fumikane Shimada combined his love of cute girls with WWII mecha to create illustrations and a line of figures called Mecha Girls. This was the beginning of a huge boom in WWII-themed anime with female characters in which all the countries of the WWII era are united against a terrible enemy called the Neuroi that invaded Europe in 1939. Although it’s all about the panties, Strike Witches is a very high-quality series.
Kantai Collection
A continuation of the concepts introduced in Strike Witches, KanColle — the name is a parody of Pari-Colle, the Paris Collection fashion show which is closely followed in Japan — re-imagines all the famous battleships of WWII as cute girls who are fighting a maritime war against a fleet of zombie ships called the Abyssal Fleet. It’s eventually revealed that the shipgirls are caught in a terrible endless purgatory of death and rebirth as their enemy. I loved the way the various shipgirls were designed so their personalities matched the unique features of each ship type.
Azur Lane
A Chinese homage to KanColle, Azur Lane is a side-scrolling shooter that lets you fight battles and collect ships, interacting with them in between battles and even marrying them, because why not? As with KanColle, a strong effort was made to get top-named artists to create official art for the franchise, though not, interestingly, Fumikane Shimada, who started the whole mecha musume thing. An anime based on the game is currently airing. See our first review here!
Space Battleship Yamato
A legendary space opera in which the Earth is being pummeled with radiation bombs by an alien empire called Gamilas, as an old battleship must be reborn as a spaceship and travel 186,000 light-years to Iscandar and back to receive technology that can save the Earth. It’s quite silly to have space battles reduced to WWII-style two-dimensional conflicts, but the story, characters and execution of Yamato make the remakes a must-watch. Read my long review of the Yamato 2202 series here.
Zipang
One of my all-time favorite anime series, Zipang is a manga and anime by Kaiji Kawaguchi that follows the JDS Mirai, a modern helicopter defense destroyer from Japan’s modern Maritime Self-Defense Forces, which is somehow transported into the Pacific at the height of WWII. The modern vessel finds itself at war with both the U.S. for Imperial Japanese Navy forces of the era, desperately trying to avoid conflict with its more modern weapons.
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