High School of the Dead: Source of Entertainment or Attraction of mindless anime zombies?

For some time, I've been told, “You've got to watch High School of the Dead! It's so awesome!” And “Man, High School of the Dead was kick ass tonight!” and I've even heard, “High School of the Dead is a action filled anime that's intelligent!” And after watching the entire series, my response is: What show was I watching?

Warning: Possible Spoilers

Okay, I'll start by saying the premise as it was described to me was interesting idea: A zombie outbreak in one of the most densely populated areas in the world, Tokyo. It's probably been done before, but I won't count it against it, cause a zombie idea can still be a lot of fun, and to the series credit, the first episode really sets the tone of the concept. It's honestly really morbid and terrifying to see all these high school students get mauled while screaming for their lives. Though, one has to wonder how the zombies got to these locations and the students are utterly surrounded when you see them, but hey it's a zombie show.

The plot centers around Takashi, a high school deviant, who has some relationship problems with his childhood friend, Rei. One day he observes the start of a zombie outbreak on his school crowd and within mere hours, the entire facility is overrun with zombies. In order to survive, bat man Takashi, spear specialist Rei, tsundere Takagi, gun maniac Kohta, sword expert Saeko, and sexy nurse Shizuka must work together and act smart to survive this zombie apocolypse. Also, there are boobs, ass, and panties. Lots of them.

The first and even the second episode sets up everything so well, the characters, the scenario and the morbidness so well that the following episodes felt really generic, which is sad because I really wanted to enjoy this series. It kept trying to be increasingly morbid and show how terrible the human race is when the worse gets going and that's good for a zombie movie like Night of the Living Dead, but when it comes to a twelve episode series that takes up a good six hours of your time, this sort of thing gets old pretty quickly. It's even worse when you have a clip show of everything that's happened on episode four, which ends up being the most pointless episode as nothing significant happens except that Takashi finds a gun. That's it.

In fact, it feels like not a lot of things happen throughout the series, other than a lot of just getting away from zombie hordes and while the fighting can be enjoyable, it ultimately gets old after a while. Occasionally, they get creative, such as using a running car to distract the mindless zombies while taking them out, but these are few and far inbetween. Oh, and I haven't touch on the buckets of fan service. I suppose one shouldn't be surprised that there is fan service, considering the artist behind the series normally draws hentai, but while occasional fan service can be amusing or appealing to a character, such as Mikoto in Mai HiME cuddling against Mai's chest, the fanservice in High School of the Dead really drags the series down. How far down? When you have a scene that is described as 'Matrix boobs', you might have a lack of quality in your series. And that's one of the more tame fan service scenes. Long story short, while I don't hate fan service, the overly major amounts of it in this series is nothing short of ridiculous and kind of off putting.

However, I have to admit half way into this show, I had a realization that maybe the creator actually wanted to try to make a semi serious zombie show, with evidence to that being the morbidness of the first couple of episodes, but after that, the show becomes bland, complete with both a clip show and a purely fanservice episode, where again, nothing happens. It's after this though that I think the creators decided to say 'screw it' and just go all out in ridiculous-ness. So what do we get? What I consider the best episode where we get one scene where a samurai chick wearing nothing but a apron is surfing a armored humvee, plowing through zombies, while the main character gets peed on his back....

How often am I going to say that happens?

After this, more things do seem to happen, including some character development, some good with episodes dedicated to one character each, and some bad that pretty much come out of no where and ultimately don't really develop the character at all. It doesn't help that the season ends on a note where nothing is more or less resolved. It's kind of disappointing and pretty much sets itself up for a second parter season, so if you want closure to your anime, you won't find it here, which leads me to another complaint.

The closest thing we have to a villain is severely underplayed. It doesn't help he gets quite a bit of build up, only to be so easily scoffed off. Now, I haven't really read the manga, but I'm told that this character really isn't the villain, just a selfish over dramatic bastard. While that's fine and dandly, I want more payoff to the build up. You honestly get the feeling that he's plotting something dastardly and nothing ever comes of it. It's like the show is one big tease that something will come but nothing happens! It's almost frustrating!

Let's move to some of the positive things, the art is pretty good and despite being high school themed and characters could've easily remained in school uniforms, they do frequently change up their appearance, while still retaining that high school appearance. The animation is also very well down and while I shake my head at things like matrix boobs and fanservice, they are well animated and are appealing to the eyes. It's just that there's too much and it drags the story (or what little there is of it) down.

The voice acting is pretty spot on, and it's hard to complain about a language that isn't your own, but emotions are brought out very well an the rock music fits the whole zombie apocolypse theme. Another thing I can commend the show for is that after a period, it seems like there's a different ending song for every episode. I can't imagine that to be easy or cheap.

All in all, though, I can't completely recommend this anime. It has it's moments, but it's a little too mindless to be enjoy by more mature audiences, which is partially it's target demographic... well... older audiences anyway, unless japanese parents are okay with little Takahiro seeing jiggling breasts and blood splattering everywhere. Again, different culture I'm not completely familiar with, but my instincts says no. Ultimately, High School of the Dead isn't anything special and only seems to rise up cause it's mildly entertaining in comparison to other animes at the time. What I recommend is going back and watching older anime that are just plain better, pure and simple.

Such would be a simple life.