Yes, HotD is fanservice laden. As a matter of fact, I felt dirty watching this anime and loving it so much. It's like Jerry Springer in that regard: you can't help but feel your brain cells being destroyed with every passing second, but you absolutely can't look away for a second. That's what HotD does to me. The story and pacing are actually quite well done, for a zombie apocalypse anime. The concept is insanely simple to grasp and follow all the way through. It feels like what you'd get if The Zombie Survival Guide got an anime adaptation and it was done by the dirtiest old man in the room, which works to its advantage.
For such a filthy anime, HotD is absolutely beautiful. Environments are well-illustrated, the directing and animation is top-notch, and even the character designs, while little can be said about the women except "boobs," serve all the right purposes at all the right times. The walking dead themselves are even well-animated for being nothing but a bunch of redshirts, essentially, which makes this about as entertaining and believable as an anime about the zombie apocalypse can be.
The sound work is okay. The music is mostly mediocre and most of the ending themes feel forced, but it gets the job done in a sort of B-movie way that brings things together in a good way. However, I VASTLY prefer Steven Foster's English dub, mainly because it sounds so much more... believable? It's hard to describe. The Japanese is well done enough, but the English dub has more substance to it. While the characters could be played by sticks with watermelons in grocery bags on them, the Japanese dub just seems somewhat less lively and doesn't accurately portray the kind of raw, high emotion the English dub seems to capture absolutely perfectly. Which is ironic, because you can't go through one episode of this anime without having the F-bomb dropped seven times a minute.
Characters, for the most part, are kind of bland and boring, but it's forgivable because they've got a strange air of realism to them. You'll be glad you don't remember their names. The character designs were made to emphasize some elements, but they leave plenty more to be desired and honestly don't cut it for me at all. But this is at least part of the reason why the English dub feels so much more realistic. It doesn't feel like you're watching an anime about the zombie apocalypse without people legitimately freaking out and not caring what they say, much less how they say it. If a character needs to say "F*** you," it doesn't feel out of place here, and it really does feel like a zombie apocalypse in that these are characters nobody else really cares about, which kinda serves its own purpose.
Despite this anime's glaring flaws - and yes, there are PLENTY - Highschool of the Dead isn't the worst thing ever to come out of Japan, and it's certainly left a mark on the zombie genre. If nothing else, I'd like to see more zombie anime come out of Japan. I don't know who I would recommend this anime to, but it's definitely a load of fun and it's worth a try if you think you'll like it.
