Gunparade March takes a slice from Starship Troopers and sends teens out to battle giant insectoid monsters.

Gunparade March. Operation 1 - 3.
TV series (12 episodes), 2003. Director: Katsushi Sakurabi. V.1-3, four episodes/100 minutes. Price & format: DVD bilingual $29.95. Distributor: Anime Works/Media Blasters.

Earth has been under attack by “genjyu” monsters for more than 50 years. The situation is so desperate that, for the past 21 years, high schools have been placed under partial military service as area defense units. The schools are provided with giant robot battle armor, and students are trained as pilots to defend their home communities against monster incursions.

The giant insectoid genjyu are vague boogeymen that never emerge from the background, nor are they supposed to. This is an adolescent slice-of-life soap opera that focuses almost entirely upon teenagers in a world where it has become accepted that a normal high school activity is being sent out on occasional military sorties. The main cast of Gunparade March (12 TV episodes broadcast February 6 - April 23, 2003, animated by the J.C. Staff studio) is Shoukei High School’s Unit 5121, a special class comprised of those students determined to have the highest aptitude for military service, either as battle-armor combat pilots, maintenance technicians or administrative staff.

Atsushi Hayami is a classic shy nerd who wishes that he had failed the aptitude tests, but is determined to do his duty and not let his teammates down. Mio Mibuya is equally determined to prove that a woman can be as good a military pilot as a man. Takayuki Setaguchi is a girl-chasing stud who is sure that being a “heroic pilot” will help him get dates. Yohei Takigawa acts so juvenile that nobody is sure whether he understands the difference between giant robot TV cartoons and videogames, and real combat. Most of the maintenance and administrative staff are girls with the standard mixture of adolescent girl personalities in high school TV series.

The catalyst for story development is the transfer of a new student to Shoukei High, and how she and the rest of Unit 5121 affect each other: Mai Shibamura, another girl pilot but coldly obsessive about defeating the genjyu, and contemptuous of any students who treat their anti-monster assignments as just another school activity like sports or drama classes.

The 12 episodes are a mixture of adolescent comedy and drama, of typical high-school social scenarios and grim battlefield action. Some of the situations are reminiscent of military humorous dramas like M*A*S*H, but with a cast that pointedly lacks the emotional maturity of adult soldiers. Hayami, Shibamura, Mibuya and their teammates are high-schoolers who are simultaneously getting pep talks about planning for their futures after they graduate, and being sent on combat missions from which they may not return. (Unit 5121 does have fatalities.)

Gunparade March has low key action and a bland sci-fi plot compared to most anime sci-fi dramas, but its characters are appealing and its action is a clear metaphor for its sympathetically practical moral: you are about to grow up whether the future looks rosy or not -- how are you prepared to face it?