Review of High School of the Dead

Review contains some small-ish spoilers. Highschool of the Dead has a lot of ingredients in its mixture. There’s action, horror, romance, gore, a bit of comedy, and LOTS of fan service. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good mixture. The show suffers a bit from an identity crisis, as it can’t decide whether it wants to be a horror show, or an ecchi one. Sure, I love both horror and ecchi, but I feel that combining the two is a bad idea. All those shots with bouncing big breasts, panties, female clothes getting wet or torn don’t mix so well with people fighting and fleeingfor their lives. It’s immersion breaking to go from seeing a guy getting his throat torn out, listening to him gurgling on his own blood, to hearing *boing boing* as a woman’s huge, bouncing breasts appear.

Is the anime good or bad? I would say neither. I don’t regret having watched it, and I might watch it again at some point, this time with English dubs. The horror, drama, action, and ecchi do provide entertainment, but most of the characters aren’t interesting enough. You gotta ask yourself what you like the most, horror or ecchi, and if you can tolerate a crude mixture of both. Whichever you prefer, don’t take the anime too seriously. At its core it’s just about killing zombies and showing off tits and panties. I assume this anime is more popular for the ecchi than the horror. Since there’s plenty of ecchi anime, but barely any zombie ones, I honestly would have preferred if this show had much less or no ecchi moments at all.

Story & setting:
It’s a cliché zombie story. A zombie outbreak occurs without explanation all over the world, with the story focusing on a city in Japan. If you get bitten, you turn into a mindless, undead ghoul within seconds or minutes. This leads to the usual mass panic, madness, and societal collapses. The story focuses on five students and a school nurse, who flee from their overrun high school in search of safety and their families. If you like ecchi, you're going to like all the well-endowed girls, torn or wet clothes revealing underwear, the bare big breasts and butts. The anime does have some decent horror elements too. Such as characters being forced to kill infected friends, and dealing with survivors who take advantage of the chaos or go insane. After all, it’s not the mindless zombies that are the biggest enemies, but fellow survivors. Paranoia and panic follow as the comforts of society crumble. There’s uncertainty of whether your family is alive or not.

Visuals & animations:
The visuals of the anime are incredible. Both the lightning and shading come together with the detailed and smooth animations real nicely. The animators managed to make the zombies look, sound, and act creepy. The combat scenes are fast and intense, as the survivors use both firearms and melee weapons. If you’re fan of gore, then there’s plenty of blood splatter and severed limbs. A lot of violence as survivors and zombies get messed up alike. If you're a gun fan, you'll probably like how detailed the guns are. Oh, and yes the fan service does look sexy. You’ll probably love the bath scene.

Music & sound:
The opening is kind of catchy. There’s good music for the horror and action scenes, ranging from fast-paced and adrenaline pumping, to more slow and somber ones. One of the sadder ones has a beautiful piano tune in it. I even went to Youtube to save some to my anime soundtrack playlist. A few do sound a bit too similar to each other, though. I think the ending song for every episode is different. So despite there only being 12 episodes, you’ll have plenty to listen to.

Characters:
They are mostly one-sided. As the anime is only 12 episodes long, we don’t get much time to get to know them. Especially when a lot of precious screentime is ‘wasted’ on fan service. In one moment the girls are fighting and killing zombies, and then soon after they’re fondling and comparing each other’s breasts at a bath. The characters usually don’t act or behave as if they are amidst a zombie outbreak, but more like they’re on an adventure, or playing a very realistic, virtual reality video game together. Some of them seem mostly unfazed by the horror they’re forced to witness and the inhuman acts they need to do to survive. Other times it’s like the zombies are just a nuisance to them and not a real threat. The students are far more capable of handling themselves than most adults, who come across as stupid and ignorant.

The leader of the group is Takashi. Despite being the main character, he’s not particularly interesting. He’s kind of generic, a lazy, reckless yet heroic student who wants to protect others. Shortly after the outbreak, he shows barely any doubt about crushing the head of an infected friend. At another point he even blasts the head off a zombie kid without blinking, or even thinking about it afterwards. Not much is known about his past. He does have two scenes that I liked quite a bit, though. The first one is when he snaps at Saya for insulting her parents, when she should be happy that they are alive, whereas the rest of the group still doesn’t know whether their parents are alive or dead. The second scene is where he comforts Saeko after she reveals her dark past, and convinces her to fight for his sake, that he accepts her faults.

The second male protagonist is Kohta. There’s really not much about him, except that he’s a wimpy, overweight gun nerd. I liked him better than Takashi. His gun interest comes into great use when the group finds several guns. I’m a bit of a gun nerd myself, and I enjoyed him talking enthusiastically about each gun they find. I liked how he said that he’s finally found something he’s good at (killing zombies), and wanted to use those skills to protecting his friends. We all want to be useful, especially during a zombie apocalypse.

Saya is a self-proclaimed genius, and there's some truth to that, as she often acts as the brains of the group to figure out strategies in what to do and where to go next. I assume a lot of fans hate Saya because she often comes off as an arrogant and stubborn bitch, but I found her to be one of the more interesting characters of the group. You understand later while she is as she is. She goes through a bit character growth and improvement as the story progresses. There’s a good scene where she finally breaks down and cries hysterically after having killed her first zombie (which nearly killed her), and she sees her blood drenched appearance in the mirror. Sadly, there aren’t any other scenes like that for her, or anyone.

Mei is the most kind-hearted and caring member of the group. The most “human”, detests fighting unless it’s necessary. The main thing about her is that she used to (and still does) love Takashi. I guess I was a bit bothered by how whiny she was. At least I could relate well to her worry about her missing father. Some of her fight scenes with a staff and later a rifle with a bayonet are cool.

Then we have the “samurai girl”, Saeko. As a skilled sword fighter, she helps keeping the others alive. Some of her swordsmanship scenes are pretty cool, especially when she upgrades her wooden sword into a real one. Though she has plenty of fan service moments like all other girls, I think Saeko is the one with the most character depth. While she usually does come across as calm, caring and collected, she does have a secret, dark and sadistic side that she takes out on the zombies. The scene where she tells Takashi about this is one of the few, great scenes of the anime. I wish more screentime and focus would have been given to Saeko, especially with her relation to Takashi.

And finally we have the school nurse, Shizuka. As an adult, you would think she’s the most level headed of the group. Instead she acts mostly as a ditzy and helpless girl. It makes you wonder how she completed her nurse training… There’s even a scene where she walks around naked outside at night, and she doesn’t even notice being nude until someone points it out to her. Her secondary role is being the group’s driver, as she's the only one with a driver’s license. So what’s her primary role? To be fan service of course, as she has the biggest breasts in the show that constantly bounce around and are often shoved (both intentionally and not) into people. She’s the least fleshed out character. Functionally, she’s the most useless of the group, as her nurse skills are barely put to use. She can’t even defend herself from zombies. If I could take a character out so there would be more focus on others, it would probably be Shizuka.

Hope the review was helpful to you.