Tetsuro Araki is well-known for bringing mainstream titans Shingeki no Kyojin and Death Note to the forefront of the anime industry, and also directed Black Lagoon, which I enjoyed. While I think Attack on Titan is completely average and in no way deserves the high ratings it gets, at least I can say it wasn't bad. With such success, I come to expect a certain standard. So when I go into an anime I haven't seen before called Highschool of the Dead, I expect it to at least be competent when I see Araki's name attached as director. And what did I get?
Fucking garbage. Highschool of the Dead was released (or should I say shat out) in 2010 and immediately became incredibly popular (currently ranked #22) for some insane reason. I'd be lying though if I said I didn't understand how it got to be so popular.
For you see, Highschool of the Dead is a classic case of tossing a series of very marketable tropes together and slapping whatever comes out onto a storyboard. Comically oversized breasts on every female? Check. Zombies? Check. High school students? Check. Excesssive fan service that turns the anime into what is essentially a glorified ecchi/harem? Check. It's the sort of mindless drivel that morons fawn over. As for me? I'm not sure I've hated anything more in my entire life. But enough about that, let's dig in!
The art is bland and uninspired. The artstyle in general is just boring and all the grey, washed-out colors in the city really get dull quickly. This anime also falls into the classic trap of using the "stupid hairstyles with stupid colors for main characters" trope, leading you to unconsciously ignore supporting characters because they don't look ridiculous. Now you may not have noticed that....but your brain did. The animation is okay for the most part but there is a thorough abuse and misuse of speed lines. In general, I consider it unacceptable at any time to exercise speed lines over still images to imitate actual animation, and Highschool of the Dead sure loves to do that! I also thought it was hilarious that the animators didn't know how to animate multiple people running at once, so whenever you see the group of main characters running together, they all run at the exact same pace and it looks so unnatural it's hilarious. Overall, F in the art/animation department.
The sound design is average. Some sound effects are good, some are re-used or sound unnatural. Pretty much a wash. As for the score, it's shit. The opening theme song is terrible, the lyrics don't make any sense at all, and the ending theme is terrible too. The in-show music is completely bland and forgettable with not a single track that sticks out as memorable. Overall, D+ in the sound department.
As for the characters....this is probably the biggest flatline in the entire production. The characters in this show are awful. Not one character that appears is well-written or interesting. Let's do a rundown, shall we? Saeko's personality is that she has boobs. Komuro's personality is that he's a piece of wood. Hirano is literally just schlock. His entire character is stupid schlock. He's annoying, he doesn't know when to shut up, and I was praying a zombie would chew his face off every moment he was on-screen. Miyamoto's personality is that she has no personality but she does have boobs. Marikawa's personality is that she has boobs and acts like a ditzy whore. And Takagi's personality is that she's a bitch. Every girl is complete with ridiculously massive breasts that flop everywhere and the show does not seem to care much for toning it down, ever. Pretty much everything involving the characters was obnoxious and grating. Overall, F- in the character department.
Now for the story. And it's shit! The story of Highschool of the Dead is so painfully uninspired and predictable it's basically pointless. It's a massive tropefest that just re-hashes everything you've seen in other (better) zombie flicks and shows. Basically a zombie apocalypse happens and a collection of terrible characters do some things and end up....wait did they end up doing again? I stopped paying attention around episode 7 and just scraped through the last 5 episodes while playing Persona Q. Let's break this shit down:
Tonally, it's a mess. I have no idea what they were trying to do here. Was it supposed to be a light-hearted fun mix of violence and old-school zombie schlock? Well, maybe. But generally HOTD isn't light-hearted at all. Any attempt they make to instill lighthearted humor basically just amounts to fanservice and boobs jiggling all over the place. If that's their idea of light-hearted, then I guess their idea of love would be a fucking orgy. Is it supposed to be a character-driven story about a ragtag group of students forced to overcome the apocalypse? Well, no. The characters are terrible and HOTD has no interest in developing them. It tries to yes, but by the time any development occurs the audience has long since given up out of boredom. Or could it be an attempt at re-inventing the zombie trope by subverting expectations with intelligent writing? Uh, no. It traces the zombie flick outline to a T and by the time HOTD is over you basically feel empty inside. If you want zombie schlock, go watch Zombieland. If you want a character-driven story in a zombie apocalypse, go play The Walking Dead. If you want clever writing and fun storytelling with zombie apocalypse as the backdrop, go watch a George A. Romero movie or 28 Days Later or something.
The story itself is, as I said before, a cut and dry clone of every other zombie-related work ever made. As for the zombies themselves, HOTD goes for the really old-school approach of having the slow, lumbering zombies. I like that. But really they're only slow-moving to allow the characters to faff about as much as possible while not dying. Take a look over at The Walking Dead and you'll notice that TWD did the same thing. The difference? They were established as a clear and consistent threat because they killed people at the start of the story and they continued to kill off characters that the plot revolves around. It put fear in your heart as an audience member because you knew that if you weren't careful they could actually kill you or kill someone you didn't want to die. It was effective and very well-done.
But in HOTD the zombies are just an accessory to the plot. They don't do anything except when it's convenient for the story. Half the time they're just sitting there off-screen while the main characters make fools of themselves. If these zombies were worth a damn, none of these characters would have survived more than 3 episodes. None of the main characters die either. And you can pretty much tell by episode 6 that they're all proudly wielding plot armor, which largely left me indifferent to their plight. There have been plenty of movies where characters seem to never die despite a dangerous setting being established, so for HOTD to do this in 2010 honestly seems pathetic and mindless.
And is it fair for me to compare Highschool of the Dead to The Walking Dead? Probably not. Do I care? Not really! I only compare them to drive home the point that Highschool of the Dead is pointless. The Walking Dead (I'm talking about the video game, by the way) came out 2 years after this anime did and it does literally everything attempted here better. That's my point.
Speaking of characters, they also seem to be bizarrely glorified by the writers. Here's what I mean. Whenever a characters comes up with a differing philosophy or they their motives differ from the main characters, they're treated as mustache-twirling villains. Once more, let's look at the Walking Dead. In TWD, there were no shortage of characters that would disagree with your decisions and frequently there were people whose personalities seemed to consistently clash with your own. But the difference is in how those characters were written. In TWD, those characters still acted like human beings, and their personalities didn't collapse in on themselves just because a zombie outbreak occurred. They generally stick to their personal motives and beliefs and do the best they can to survive. For the most part, anyways. In HOTD though, anyone who has a different view of things is just an evil bastard. Mr. Shido is treated like a fucking cartoon villain and basically only exists to further push this idea forward that all the characters are somehow more likeable just because they aren't complete monsters like Shido. Spoiler alert guys, it didn't work. I hated all the characters.
Mr. Shido is also shoehorned back into the story after he initially appeared in a completely nonsensical manner that seemed to indicate that he and his cronies were just chilling in their bus until they had to be part of the plot again. Maybe it was explained what they were doing all that time, but by that point I had long since stopped caring. The EMP rocket at the end of the show is also awful deus ex machina pulled right of the writer's ass. Why the hell would Russia or whoever send an EMP bomb? Wouldn't their motive be to just wipe the entire area out? And where the hell did that plot element come from? As I said, it's an asspull, and a really bad one. I think that's about all I can stomach to talk about for the story. Overall, F- in the story department.
As far as enjoyment goes, I hated this anime. I hated it more than No Game No Life and Lucky Star, which I didn't even think was fucking possible. It insulted my intelligence constantly, offered absolutely nothing new, had no subtlety or nuance, and its constant pandering and excessive fan-service annoyed me to no end. If I were to grade enjoyment, it would be a F-.
And that's Highschool of the Dead. The story is trope-heavy and too predictable, the characters are either obnoxious or personality-deprived, the fanservice is so excessive it basically serves no purpose, it added absolutely nothing new to the zombie genre or anime as a whole, it has no artistic value in my eyes, and there is nothing here that is even remotely redeeming.
Highschool of the Dead gets a 1/10.
~Snake
