Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt – 11



Of course it’s great to see Garterbelt’s past here, but what really made this episode for me was its brilliant second half. It pretty much was about nothing: Panty and Stocking sitting in front of the television being really bored. But the entire half was shot on the same camera on the same position. It only panned twice, it only cut three times. Apart from that, it was all about Panty and Stocking randomly talking, along with Chuck, Brief and Garterbelt who appeared along the way. I love these kinds of episodes that really take this unconventional way of storytelling.

And still there were plenty of things going on with that half being everything but boring. Panty and Stocking being bored was surprisingly interesting, especially when you learn about the bizarre context at the end of the episode: Garterbelt spending ten hours inside the kitchen in order to cook a lunch party to celebrate that his afro was announced as the best afro in the world. The voice acting was especially fun and excellent here, and I like how the animation brought the characters here to life without a camera that usually keeps changing positions. I also really liked the final punchline. That was some great comedic timing there.

A lot of the anime today are just too safe and hardly ever bother with episodes like this and that’s quite a shame, really. There’s a ton of potential here if you’d just wish to abandon conventions and that’s what I really appreciate this series for doing.

Oh, and it’s not like Garterbelt’s backstory was uninteresting either. I mean, with the entire history tour that this guy made, parodying everything from Adam and Eve to the vikings.
Rating: *** (Awesome)

4 thoughts on “Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt – 11

  1. The second part:reminds me of classical comic theatre,since in a play,there’s no camera so as an audience you always have one angle as seen here.
    It even respects the “3 classical rules”:one simple plot (girls eating) happened in one location and in 24 hours or less,it even has 3 acts,you can easely divide those acts into scenes depending on which characters move in or out of the scene like in theatre.

    No idea how intentional that was,but it’s gainax afterall…

    You don’t see this kind of stuff much in movies or animation because it takes away editing and editng is what really helped cinema take off.
    The first fictional movies were like this,put a camera and have diffent characters that come and go in front of it.But people just viewed this as a “poor man’s theatre”,it’s not until filmakers started playing around with editing:at first different camera angles or things like parallel editing where 2 things are happening at the same time in different locations that people really started viewing movies as something other than a “poor man’s theatre”.
    So I guess that’s why you don’t see much of what we saw here,it gows far back but because filmakers wanted to differentiate themselves from theatre they wouldn’t just leave one camera standing in one place (i know there’s exeptions,i’m just talking in general).
    But it’s funny how things have come around,these days a lot less people go to the theatre so they’re not used to this kind of storytelling and what might have seemed conventional 130 years ago is now esperimental!

  2. Like you said, for some reason the 2nd part remembered me plays like “Six characters looking for an author” or “Waiting for Godot”.

  3. The 2nd half was definitely a budget saving segment but I think that it was really good one.

    I’m glad you noted the VAs performances during the 2nd segment as well. I particularly liked Panty’s explanation of her plan to return to heaven.

  4. The second half of this episodes reminds me of an episode of Invader Zim (“Zim Eats Waffles”) where Zim literally sits at his table and does nothing but eat waffles (with similar strange and humorous banter going on occasionally). With their blatant copy of GIR (Chuck), I wouldn’t be surprised if they got some …inspiration from this episode as well.

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