Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt

Genre(s): Comedy, Parody

Age-Appropriateness: 17+ (Extremely Strong Language, Sexual humor, Sexual content, Nudity, Profanity, Violence)

Platforms: Funimation (will likely transfer to Crunchyroll in the near future, but hasn’t yet)

Episodes: 13 (each contains two half-length episodes, +1 OVA)

TheAwersome Rating: 7.8 / 10 (Fantastic with a handful of misses)

Premise: The “Anarchy Sisters,” Panty and Stocking, have been kicked out of Heaven for, to put it mildly, misbehaving. Led by a priest named Garterbelt, these angels must buy their way back by exterminating ghosts in Daten City. But this task requires unconventional weapons for these unorthodox angels—they transform their lingerie into weapons to dispatch the spirits. Unfortunately, neither of them takes their duties seriously, as they’d rather spend their time in pursuit of other “hobbies”: Panty prefers to sleep with anything that walks, and Stocking favors stuffing her face with sweets over hunting ghosts.

TheAwersome’s Thoughts: You’re probably seeing the art style and thinking “wait, this is anime? It looks like Danny Phantom meets Powerpuff Girls!” Well, that was the goal. They definitely went hard for that “Early 2000’s Cartoon Network” vibe and wanted to make this look (and feel?) as American as possible. As such, I recommend the English Dub. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed hearing the “Ingurishu,” (Japanese speakers pronouncing English cuss words, specifically) but as the whole goal of this show was to be as crass as possible, the English language just can’t be beat when it comes to creative cussing. And there is no shortage of it, boy howdy.

The comedy and characters had us dying a lot of the time, but not without every third or fourth episode being a real flop. To their credit, the show is VERY experimental (and not just because it’s crass and animated differently), which I support. It’s just that some episodes really felt like the interns handled it because both animation and writing just seemed off.

TLDR: A fast, quick, crass, hilarious change of pace. Watch the dub.

Yes, this is by Gainax before becoming Trigger, so it’s the same people that brought you Gurren Lagann, Kill la Kill, FLCL, all that jazz.

Disclaimer: You might see the R rating and how Sexual humor, content, and nudity are all in the content tags and think “Oh boy, a SUPER Ecchi!” and you would be wrong. While sex is a frequent topic of humor here, I would not classify this as erotic, just raunchy. With the exception of the transformation sequence which only happens a few times, nothing here is drawn or animated with the intention of being fan-servicey.

You’ll Likely Enjoy This if You Enjoyed:

• The crass comedy of the Ghost Stories English dub
• The fast-paced, high octane parody nature of Kill la Kill
• Bold, heavily stylized animation of Kill la Kill, Gurren Lagann, Flip Flappers