Ask John: Was Girls und Panzer Inspired by a Russian MMO?

Question:
It seems like there a pretty fair number of people that play the MMO “World of Tanks” that have also watched the anime “Girls und Panzer” so that got me wondering if there’s any correlation between the two. Was “Girls und Panzer” created because of the game “World of Tanks”?

Answer:
Girls and tanks have been paired in anime for a long time. While a tank figured prominently in director Mamoru Oshii’s 1984 film Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer, manga artist Masamune Shirow brought the pairing to prominence with his 1985 manga Dominion and its 1988 anime adaptation. The Russian online battle game World of Tanks launched in 2010 and is played by millions of people worldwide, but although the game is accessible by Japanese players, it’s not officially distributed or supported in Japan, and there are no official servers running the game in Japan. I don’t know whether Girls Und Panzer creator & director Tsutomu Mizushima was familiar with the World of Tanks game before or during his creation of the anime series. I can’t dismiss the possibility, but the Girls Und Panzer franchise certainly seems to be more prominently inspired by contemporary anime like K-On and its depiction of a school club of cute girls diving into a field unfamiliar to them, the 2010 Sora no Woto television series, which depicted cute girls piloting a futuristic tank into battle, and recent military-girl anime series Sky Girls, Strike Witches, and Upotte.