New PANTY & STOCKING with GARTERBELT

Episode 10

So much of New Panty & Stocking has been Absolute Cinema, as it were, so it's only about time an episode swung for the openly cinematic. This is an anime that's always had a tenuous relationship with canon, but this week's entry truly hands things over into the noncanonical anthology/pastiche angle. It goes all Simpsons Treehouse of Horror with a couple of strongly styled entries in what I could term Garterbelt's Cabinet of Curiosities. Yes, that's already a lot of references, but Panty & Stocking has always been referential, and this week, the movie-parody episode titles are earned by the segments directly shouting them out.

Both of the segments this week come courtesy of director Akira Furukawa, who corralled the insanity of Hiroyuki Imaishi's storyboards back in New Panty & Stocking's show-stopping show-starting season premiere, and also contributed the slasher-movie send-up in the fifth episode. So clearly Furukawa's always had the side of a cinephile, and that also comes through in the sourcing choices of both of these episodes. The results are equal parts inspired and inspirationally idiotic, as this series is wont to be. Their The Thing title card recreates the iconic poster image, but with the light shining out of the mysterious figure's crotch instead of the face. That's brilliantly stupid and it comes out before the episode's even properly started!

You ever think about the fact that The Thing is also the perfect title for its own porn parody? That's also effectively entirely the opening conceit of this segment, as the story by Imaishi and Rino Yamazaki continues to get the most mileage possible out of this anime's uncensored Amazon run. A fully nude Panty (and later Stocking) flatly fucks the life out of a host of hapless homies, and it's the plain absurdity of the situational send-up that sells it for humor instead of anything approaching horniness or horror. They do block out Brief and Garter's dicks though, so there's apparently still a non-equal-opportunity line. They're also mostly aiming to wild out the audience, with Panty's disembodied monster-head sliding between Brief and Stocking's throats, or the whole absurd adventure ending on forced self-unbirth. Panty & Stocking is arguably at its best when it's straddling the line between humor and "helping" its audience discover niche fetishes.

The crew's also coming together for more kaiju-sized insanity similar to the premier's antics with the ending of this entry, and a hulked-out Chuck tangling with the Stocking-creature now doing an Aliens riff. The rules of parody are not set in stone. It delivers the violence quotient alongside the previous all-out sex, and it's as gleefully glorious to watch as anything else this season has indulged in. I'll note that New Panty & Stocking is absolutely lapping the original in terms of lavish, large-scale action animation. Original Recipe Panty & Stocking always seemed a bit more concerned with stylizing its juvenile humor just enough with only occasional pop-offs like its sixth episode. But the New season feels like it's had multiple major cuts of cutting loose every week. It's what's made this season feel so fully loaded as a showcase, and is another reason I argue it feels more ambitious, more evolved, more impressive than its fifteen-years-ago freshman outing.

That sort of ambition is seen in equal measure, and alternate presentation, in the second cinematic segment, which asks the profound question of "What is best in life?" Doing a Conan parody is only about as fresh as doing one of Aliens, but it's the way that New Panty & Stocking tackles the material that makes it feel so special in this case. That is, they're shooting for a specific vibe. If I could ambitiously hazard a guess, this segment seems to be borne out of Furukawa, or Yoh Yoshinari, or Yūto Kaneko, or someone involved with this story having a memory of stumbling upon a crusty VHS copy of Conan the Barbarian and consuming it sans any Japanese translation. This animated approximation of the material is presented in made-up language (with doubly made-up subtitles!), filtered through an only occasionally obscuring old-school filter, letting audiences live the experience of hazily sort of following a story they might later just partially recall as an impactful, if incomplete memory.

Between the various parodies and old cartoon references, Panty & Stocking has always had one foot planted in the realm of nostalgia. But as demonstrated by things like the Jack Kirby call-out in the fourth episode, it's also always had purpose to those old-school affectations. This Conan compilation is much the same, communicating a very specific kind of nostalgia and wielding it for entertainment that's genuine on its own terms. Just as it is when you're younger and puzzling over an untranslated comic or video game, it's engaging to follow a story this way, especially one that's just blunt enough to not leave viewers too behind in terms of plot. Specific story elements like Brief's explanation can be left unclarified because they're irrelevant to the true entertainment value of the piece. That entertainment, of course, includes the buff, titties-out version of Panty humping a demon-woman before burning her to death. The original Conan wasn't exactly known for density of narrative either. I'm only a little disappointed they didn't find a moment to shout-out that part where Conan punches a camel.

It's remarkable that, wild as New Panty & Stocking has gotten, ten weeks in it scarcely seems to have scratched the surface of running out of ambition. That's only natural when the folks at Trigger, by their own admission, really were spending these last fifteen years conceiving of and developing all the ideas they could come up with for a second season of this show. Something like a The Thing parody is one of those ideas that feels remarkable they didn't get to the first time, but the extra decade and change in the oven was certainly kind to the final execution. The specific nostalgia of the Conan segment, on the other hand, can only feel like something indulged later down the line like this. This is an episode that makes me believe that Panty & Stocking could truly work as an irregular talent showcase anthology that Trigger just busts out every now and again. And both in terms of the episodes this season has left, and the studio's projects afterwards, I cannot wait to see what they come up with next.

Rating:

New PANTY & STOCKING with GARTERBELT is currently streaming on Prime Video.

Chris has to slay a bunch of anime reviews to earn his own Heaven and Hell coins, and he hopes his editors won't deduct too much for occasional potty mouth here, given the context. He's probably reskeeting fanart of Panty and/or Stocking on his BlueSky right now, and you can also check out his own back catalog over on his blog.

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Disclosure: Kadokawa World Entertainment (KWE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, is the majority owner of Anime News Network, LLC. One or more of the companies mentioned in this article are part of the Kadokawa Group of Companies.