Review of Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead

Zom 100 has a lot going for it, especially in its premise and first three or so episodes. This anime has an absolutely stellar first episode in particular, but as I continued to watch the story unfold, and like a zombie left out in the sun for too long, I realized that things could only get worse from here. Zom is a lot of style and very little substance. The animation, the choreography, the striking use of colorful paint in the place of zombie blood, everything on a visual level is just amazing. The opening song is an ABSOLUTE banger, and the both of theopening animations are just so fun to watch and listen to. Which is why it's so disappointing that I can't give this show a stronger recommend than I am. It's not a bad show at all, but I feel like Zom 100 definitely falls short of what it potentially could have been.

Zom 100's core message is that we all take life too seriously, and we need to stop waiting for "the day things finally get better for us" because that day will never come. It might come in the form of a zombie apocalypse, or something as quietly sinister as the slow passing of time, but for those of us with freedom and life, we owe ourselves the happiness we could have if we just lived life more fully. Our protagonist, Akira, realizes this too late as he seeks to live out the best life he possibly can now that there's a real sense of urgency in his life.

...And that's pretty much all there is to the message. It's safe and relatable, but the lack of nuance doesn't leave much room for further exploration. Characters and ideas are victim to this problem as well; things are either entirely good or evil, black and white. The villains of the show are made to be relatable but NOT very sympathetic, and as a result bad guys in Zom end up feeling like comic book villain stereotypes who are boring to watch.

This problem also extends to the main characters. All of whom, except for one at the start, are extremely good-natured people with very few negative characteristics if any. This isn't realistic and serves to make it hard to identify with these characters. There just isn't much depth to our cast of heroes, as fun as they are to watch. They also have relatively poor chemistry as most of them don't really open up to each other very much, however they've only just met so this is understandable to an extent.

The first season ends with a prolonged conflict, and without spoiling anything, I can promise you that you'll be rolling your eyes by the end of it. There's so much moral grandstanding and selfrightrousness written into these characters, it stops being belivable and just feels like a power fantasy cooked up by the author. I won't deny that there is a definite catharsis to it, but there's something so silly about how these later problems were handled that just doesn't sit right with me. Like I said, absolutely no room for exploration, all of life's problems wrapped up in a nice tidy package.

And speaking of catharsis, there's definitely a good sense of it in seeing these characters live out some of our dreams and fantasies, like the idea of quitting your dead-end job by kicking your zombified boss out of a tall building. But this thrill gets old pretty quickly, and it suddenly becomes apparent the the story isn't really sure where to take things from here. It wants to deliver these deep, thoughtful and incisive morals and lessons, but fails to consider that it needs a bit more than "society bad"

This is just season 1 so I'm hopeful this anime can get on its feet by then, but if nothing else Zom 100 is a very good anime to just turn your brain off to. Zom 100 feels shockingly fresh in a world full of zombie-related media and post-zombie media fatigue, but fails to do enough to capitalize on its core ideals.