Review of High School of the Dead
I'll make this short and sweet. Take out the fan service, and you've got a great anime. Take out Rei, too, for that matter - or put Hisashi back in. The creator of this series does hentai, too, just as a warning - there's not much nudity in this, except for the episode where the girls bathe, but that was in the manga too. However, here's my take on this. Watch the anime before reading the manga. The anime skipped some chapters and rearranged them, as well. The manga is much better than the anime, and has less fan service - so if you don't likethat stuff, skip the anime and head straight for the manga scanlation sites.
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Story: For the most part, it's very good. I'd even say great. This is how a zombie apocalypse should be. Very rarely has an anime done it right - actually, I don't believe they've ever done it right. Only video games and live action movies have, but never an anime - at least, not from my experience. With that being said, it's nice to see an anime depict monsters how they really are. Zombies were meant to be mindless creatures who only cared for more bloodshot - the only thing that came close to that was the Rosario+Vampire version of a ghoul, but I'm not even going to talk about that here. However, not only do they depict the zombies, or "them" (as the anime calls them), how they should be depicted, they also manage to keep it more realistic by mentioning the government issues.
Art: The art's fantastic from my point of view. Sure, I'd rather not look at Kouta on my computer screen, but that's just me being a horny female whenever I see Takashi. That being said, they could have made the females a little more realistic. Not every 16-18 year old girl will have big breasts. Shizuka's appearance was understandable, what high school boy doesn't want a hot nurse? None, I tell you - unless he's gay, but that's not the point. I'm not surprised by the unrealistic depiction of women in this anime, since the creator works with hentai - but I'm slightly offended.
Sound: I only liked the OP, personally. The EDs were decent though. Won't comment on the character's voices, though, as I watched the dubbed version.
Character: Characters were pretty well-developed, with two exceptions. Shizuka is too much of a ditz. I know there's the whole "dumb blonde" stereotype, but this took it too far. She sees her clothes being as important as her like, and let me tell you, not even the dumbest blonde in real life would risk her life for a damned skirt. The other character that needed more work would be Rei - and I'm not just saying this because Saeko's my favorite female character. She's a little too dependent on Takashi. Then there's the fact that she yelled at him for killing her boyfriend when said boyfriend had been turned into a zombie. The beginning of the first episode gave me high hopes for her, but they died by the end of the same episode - and each new episode only made me dislike her more. I'll admit she has some good points to her, but most of those only show when she's alone with Takashi - and even then it's rare.
Enjoyment: I enjoyed this anime very much. It's definitely worth it if you haven't seen it already. However, it would have been better if it wasn't so short. There's more action in the last two episodes than there is in the first ten combined, in my opinion. They could have fit a lot more into this series if they hadn't been doing one episode per chapter - and they didn't even do them in the right order.
Overall, it's a great anime. I would definitely re-watch it. Despite the fan service, it's very enjoyable. Like I said earlier, it's a zombie apocalypse done right.