Dawn Of The World (末日曙光) is a Chinese anime taking place in a post-apocalyptic world, where people have been infected and turned into zombies. The few people left are to struggle and trust each other to survive winter. The plot is focused on the two main characters, Meng Feng (蒙烽) and Liu Yan (刘研). To make it short, one is the fighter, the other the engineer/mechanic/strategist. The story is what we can expect from a zombie-anime, is not particularly original, but people who liked AoT, Kabaneri of The Iron Fortress and Highschool of The Dead are quite likely to like this one as well.
Many zombie animes/films picture hopeless situations, ie the zombies are undead, difficult to kill, run really fast, are sometimes able to think, people turn into zombies in seconds after being bitten… There is nothing that can be done until one hero suddenly finds a solution and – this is magic – every one is able to escape (at least temporarily) and this hero acts as a beacon of hope towards new horizons…. I strongly prefer Dawn Of The World’s zombies : they are slow, easy to kill, stupid, so it is actually possible to fight them and therefore it is more a matter of strategy : even if you can easily kill your enemy, if you let it surround you, you will die when run out of munitions!
Some people may fear the BL tag, please don’t. No BL for me in this anime, perhaps there are several versions of it and I saw the one destined to the Chinese audience (without BL of course) – anyway the version I saw definitely does not “deserves” the BL tag! (although a BL version of this is quite easy to imagine).
I strongly support Chinese animation that has something that can’t be found in Japanese animation, and I really recommend studios like Tencent Pinguin Pictures (the one that did this anime), which has enough technology and skills to compete in quality with the more classical Japanese studios, as they have proved with The King's Avatar (Quanzhi GaoShou) and Mo Dao Zu Shi.
I am not going to make this review longer, so in short:
+: Good OST, good opening, story with good rhythm, realistic zombies, good voices (Chinese is very nice to hear), nice art + animation for Chinese studio.
-: Too many characters, not always easy to remember all of them, personalities could have been a bit more developed, some parts of the story remain a bit unclear, inconvenient with Chinese anime is that subtitles are rare and not always accurate (understanding Chinese, I could tell that some parts weren’t subtitled – even if it was a minor issue for global understanding).
Overall 8/10, I liked this anime, of course there are many things I could think of to criticize, but I would definitely recommend it if you like the genre. I would say it's underrated (deserves an average 7.5 at least). This anime is quite short, and if you want to experience a Chinese anime you can give this one a try (I would rather recommend Quanzhi Gaoshou and Mo Dao Zu Shi for the first Chinese anime though).
