Anime Review 001: Highschool of the Dead
OK, I guess that hardly anyone will be interested in these, but I'm going to attempt to review a few series and books on here. If I get more confident, maybe I'll try posting them on some relevant communities, but until then...hello to everyone not reading this!
As you might expect from an anime called Highschool of the Dead, this series has a lot of dead people. Yet these zombies, or ‘them’ as the series christens them, are far from the scariest thing in this show. Never mind the ravenous zombies munching their way through the population, it’s the sheer size of the female characters’ breasts that should have you running for the hills.
Highschool of the Dead is a mixture of the harem and horror genres, and boy does it show. I sat down to watch this with high expectations - a friend had really enjoyed it, and I was still on a zombie high from AMC’s The Walking Dead - yet by the time I reached the end of episode 2, all of those expectations had been crushed. Sadly, the series is a perfect example of why genre mixing can go horribly wrong. Whilst I’ve been informed that Japan generally prefers its’ zombies mixed with fanservice and schoolgirls, my main problem here isn’t the presence of fanservice, but the way the series uses it.
Whilst films such as Big Tits Zombies and Attack Girls’ Swim Team Versus the Undead can pull off the twin-genre style, they accomplish this by integrating the fanservice into their general plots; Big Tits Zombies revolves around strippers, and features several well-known faces from Japan’s AV industry, whilst Attack Girls can arguably be described as (bad) softcore porn first, and zombie horror second. Highschool of the Dead, in comparison, doesn’t seem to really know what it wants to do with its’ genres. The show switches from generic harem style to apocalyptic nightmare at the blink of an eye, yet this juxtaposition only serves to further show how little this series knows what it really wants to do.
We are treated to chilling scenes of humanity’s selfishness when under pressure - one little girl’s father is stabbed to death for trying to share a family’s shelter - and watch as the protagonists realise how hopeless their future really is. Yet it’s impossible to get emotionally involved because, the next thing we know, breasts are wobbling all over the place and skirts are flying up to reveal oh-so-titillating underwear.
The best example of this occurs in episode 8. The main characters are trapped, with no way out as hoards of zombies approach. All they can do is go out fighting. We watch, heart in our mouths as they prepare to make their last stand…and suddenly we’re in the Matrix, watching as slow-mo bullets fly between breasts and past crotches. This may seem like a crowning moment of awesome to some people, but it completely destroys what the series seemed desperate to convey only moments before.
Factor in the completely out of context drunken bathing in episode 6 (seriously - naked girls molesting each other in the bathtub, only emerging upstairs to drape themselves over the guys), and you have a series which goes from borderline ridiculous-but-amusing to what-on-earth-were-they-thinking. Are we seriously meant to believe that, in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, these girls had nothing better to do than get drunk, loud and horny? You could almost divide this episode into halves - it’s like two different animes got smushed together for no reason at all.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m not saying that this is an awful series, or that you shouldn’t watch it. But the fact that the fanservice only seems to get properly integrated for the last three episodes is, to put it bluntly, simply not good enough. This should have been an awesome series that had me alternating between laughter and tense anticipation, yet it fails to deliver on both. Whilst I can accept that I’m not the target audience for this show, I refuse to believe that’s the reason for the lack of wow factor. I enjoy zombie series. I can even enjoy harem anime when they’re not too in your face (Ichigo 100% and Love Hina, for example). The problem here is that this series is neither one nor the other, and certainly doesn’t make use of either genre to its’ best advantage.
If you can look past the awkward clash of genres, you’ll probably get a whole lot more out of this series than I did. And I definitely enjoyed parts of it. But no series should fail to get its’ act together until the last quarter.
For that reason, I can only give it 3/5.
As you might expect from an anime called Highschool of the Dead, this series has a lot of dead people. Yet these zombies, or ‘them’ as the series christens them, are far from the scariest thing in this show. Never mind the ravenous zombies munching their way through the population, it’s the sheer size of the female characters’ breasts that should have you running for the hills.
Highschool of the Dead is a mixture of the harem and horror genres, and boy does it show. I sat down to watch this with high expectations - a friend had really enjoyed it, and I was still on a zombie high from AMC’s The Walking Dead - yet by the time I reached the end of episode 2, all of those expectations had been crushed. Sadly, the series is a perfect example of why genre mixing can go horribly wrong. Whilst I’ve been informed that Japan generally prefers its’ zombies mixed with fanservice and schoolgirls, my main problem here isn’t the presence of fanservice, but the way the series uses it.
Whilst films such as Big Tits Zombies and Attack Girls’ Swim Team Versus the Undead can pull off the twin-genre style, they accomplish this by integrating the fanservice into their general plots; Big Tits Zombies revolves around strippers, and features several well-known faces from Japan’s AV industry, whilst Attack Girls can arguably be described as (bad) softcore porn first, and zombie horror second. Highschool of the Dead, in comparison, doesn’t seem to really know what it wants to do with its’ genres. The show switches from generic harem style to apocalyptic nightmare at the blink of an eye, yet this juxtaposition only serves to further show how little this series knows what it really wants to do.
We are treated to chilling scenes of humanity’s selfishness when under pressure - one little girl’s father is stabbed to death for trying to share a family’s shelter - and watch as the protagonists realise how hopeless their future really is. Yet it’s impossible to get emotionally involved because, the next thing we know, breasts are wobbling all over the place and skirts are flying up to reveal oh-so-titillating underwear.
The best example of this occurs in episode 8. The main characters are trapped, with no way out as hoards of zombies approach. All they can do is go out fighting. We watch, heart in our mouths as they prepare to make their last stand…and suddenly we’re in the Matrix, watching as slow-mo bullets fly between breasts and past crotches. This may seem like a crowning moment of awesome to some people, but it completely destroys what the series seemed desperate to convey only moments before.
Factor in the completely out of context drunken bathing in episode 6 (seriously - naked girls molesting each other in the bathtub, only emerging upstairs to drape themselves over the guys), and you have a series which goes from borderline ridiculous-but-amusing to what-on-earth-were-they-thinking. Are we seriously meant to believe that, in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, these girls had nothing better to do than get drunk, loud and horny? You could almost divide this episode into halves - it’s like two different animes got smushed together for no reason at all.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m not saying that this is an awful series, or that you shouldn’t watch it. But the fact that the fanservice only seems to get properly integrated for the last three episodes is, to put it bluntly, simply not good enough. This should have been an awesome series that had me alternating between laughter and tense anticipation, yet it fails to deliver on both. Whilst I can accept that I’m not the target audience for this show, I refuse to believe that’s the reason for the lack of wow factor. I enjoy zombie series. I can even enjoy harem anime when they’re not too in your face (Ichigo 100% and Love Hina, for example). The problem here is that this series is neither one nor the other, and certainly doesn’t make use of either genre to its’ best advantage.
If you can look past the awkward clash of genres, you’ll probably get a whole lot more out of this series than I did. And I definitely enjoyed parts of it. But no series should fail to get its’ act together until the last quarter.
For that reason, I can only give it 3/5.