High School of the Dead is an anime based upon the manga series. It is comprised of 12 episodes plus an OVA. The main character is KomuroTakashi, who is a high school student. He’s in a depressed state upon seeing his childhood friend and crush, Miyamoto Rei, date his best friend Igo Hisashi. However, while he was standing alone brooding over this in the fire escape stairs, he sees the PE teacher being approached by someone and then killed. The teacher than becomes animated again and Takashi realizes that they are zombies.
The zombie attack is brutal and you can feel the despair that all the students and teachers must be feeling in such a situation. You cannot run, the zombies cannot be killed, and even one tiny bite will cause you to turn into one of them. During the confusion that ensues, Takashi rounds up Rei and Hisashi. The trio heads to the roof to barricade themselves until help can arrive. The scale of the zombie apocalypse is quickly revealed, and it is scary how far reaching it is. Thus the characters have to decide on what they do. Should they stay in school and try to fortify their current location or venture out to find help and see if their families are safe?
However, for every good point to the anime, there is a negative. There are more than a few coincidental moments that are a bit too coincidental used to move the plot forward. The anime throws in fan service panty shots at every chance and it does not suit the tone of the atmosphere at all. You’ll have the characters fighting for their lives, desperately keeping the zombie from biting themselves when the scene suddenly flashes under their skirts. It’s inelegant fan service.
The mood whiplash in a lot of the scenes is jarring. At times, the anime is a great zombie survival horror show with how the world reacts to the disaster, and how ti struggles to contain the situation, let alone recover from it. On the other hand, we have suggestive scenes and typical fan service scenes. The female characters, no matter how little sense it makes, manage to somehow get new outfits that are extremely revealing and offer literally no protection, whether it is from the elements or from the zombies.
Despite the zombie being very strong when they were first introduced, they eventually become nothing to the main characters. They are easily dispatched by a hit to the head. There are a lot of blood splatters but the strategic camera angles will avoid showing the gore. There was an early episode that pulled together clip-show elements interspersed with most new content. It was painful to watch since all the events were still so fresh. What was also dubious was Komuro and Rei’s relationship, which are constantly teased and hinted upon. However, Rei’s attitude leaves a lot to be desired, especially since she keeps involving Hisashi. It actually detracts from the series and doesn’t feel like it is worth rooting for.
Over the course of the episodes, we see the population panicking and the armed forces struggle to defend against such an infectious disease. Civilization starts to collapse and you get the crazy conspiracy theorists that impede rather than aid the situation. It has turned into a cruel world where people have to kill each other in order to just survive. When you’re barricaded, you don’t want strangers coming in and so you kill to avoid confrontation. Annoyingly, a character that was introduced in the beginning that looked like will be trouble (and has a slimy and hard to like personality) ends up eventuating to nothing. While good because it was already painful to watch them in the limited scenes that they were in, it is also disappointing because they used so much time to set it up and never doing anything with it.
The ending is despairing and also saddening at the sacrifices that some of the characters had to make. It is all the worse because it is due to the stupid mistakes of others. The anime doesn’t end at a good point since it’s in the middle of the crisis and the characters are nowhere near safe. The OVA is a short side story that has no consequence. While it takes place after the main series, its sole purpose is for fan service. You’ll see the characters in swimsuits doing normal beach stuff. To top it off, they’ll start performing some suggestive actions, going further than what the main series could.
Overall, High School of the Dead had a lot of potential. However, its tendency to focus on fan service, no matter how awkward and out of place it is, does ruin it somewhat. The times it touched upon how civilization tries to avoid collapse and contain this unprecedented disaster are some of the most interesting scenes. In the end, it is an average show that has some highlights.
-----------------------------------------
For other anime reviews, have a look at this page.