Takashi Komuro was just your average Japanese teenager... Or perhaps he was slightly below average, since he was recently held back a grade? Regardless, he was a relatively normal teenage boy, dealing with the same kind of romantic woes, academic stressors and general ennui that’s common among those his age, except that when he skipped class one fateful day in order to contemplate it all, he happened to bear witness to a horrifying site... A seemingly minor scuffle by the front gates ends in a teacher being savagely bitten, and then turning around to bite another teacher! It’s the first zombie attack he had ever witnessed, but it wouldn’t be the last, as he teams up with five other survivors... A ditzy teacher, a clever tsundere, a bullied military otaku, a savage kendo girl, and his own unrequited love, to make their way through the undead hordes with the deceptively simple goal of surviving another day! And even if there is no actual safe haven awaiting them, they’re going to wage this war of attrition to the bitter end.
Highschool of the Dead was produced by Madhouse, and while their output tends to be a bit bipolar in terms of budget allocation, thankfully this particular title seems to have been considered one of their higher priorities, as they clearly had no shortage of money to pour into the visuals. The animation is generally smooth and consistent, with any and all budget saving tricks expertly disguised behind highly stylized visuals. The backgrounds are absolutely exquisite, immaculately detailed and consistently attentive to the tone of any given scene. You’ll occasionally see flower petals floating across the near foreground of a scene, just as a really pretty touch of ambience whenever needed. The action is fast and well choreographed, featuring a ton of fun set pieces and camera techniques, flawlessly integrated CGI effects, and the undead scourge themselves are pale and sickly looking without entirely losing that shred of humanity from their previous lives.
Granted, the high budget isn’t too surprising, given that this series was directed by Tetsuro Araki, whose resume should speak for itself. Sure, he directed this anime BEFORE he directed Attack on Titan or Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress, but having his name so prominently attached to Death Note alone should have been enough of an excuse for Madhouse to hand him buckets and buckets of cash. With Death Note, Araki took a dialogue heavy series that could have turned out boring under a more conventional pair of hands, and he cranked the show’s energy level up to eleven through intense pacing and exciting visual tricks that enhanced the material, rather than distracting from it. While Death Note may have been a breakout directorial effort for Araki, Highschool of the Dead was a statement of intent, solid proof that he could catch lightning in a bottle again, and damn it he has not let us down since.
I will say, though, there are a couple of issues I have with the visual aspect of the series, and to get the easy one out of the way first, while characters’ facial expressions are on point most of the time, there is the odd moment where Araki is animating a villain character, and he goes overboard in over-animating their psychotic expressions, without a hint of nuance or banality that a character pushed to evil by these horrific circumstances probably needs. The other issue I have is that while I love the character designs for the most part, with almost every character featuring proportions that are as close to realistic as an anime character’s proportions can get, the exception to this is breasts. I believe in my Peter Grill review, I came up with the term “The Pillsbury effect,” for the way a pair of boobs will dramatically change in size, suddenly growing a cup when undressed, but that isn't entirely the case here. In this show, breasts change both size and shape from shot to shot, regardless of coverage, and they are drawn/animated in the most distractingly unnatural ways.
And as long as we’re discussing character designs, there is one that really bothers me, that being the tsundere character Saya Takagi, who seems like she was designed specifically to give me personally a migraine. This isn’t going to be the case for everyone... Hell, it might legitimately just be an issue for me... But there is something about the specific shade of pink in her hair, and the extra sharp angles in the shape of her pigtails, that leaves my head pounding like a hungry zombie at the front door. Her voice also doesn’t help, as Maggie Flecknoe brings this artificial shrillness to her delivery, overly snarky but at slightly too low a register to pull it off. This is a really weird problem to have, because while there’s a lot you can say about Steven Foster as an ADR director and script writer, he usually at least does a fantastic job at casting, and assigning his ultra talented stable of actors the right roles for any given project, and yet I can think of any number of sentai filmworks actresses who would have made Saya a little more palatable.
But yes, it is a Steven Foster dub, and I think it might actually be one of his more infamous ones. For those who don’t know, Steven Foster was... Is? We’ll say was, because we’re talking about his dubbing career. He was the primary writer and ADR director for ADV Films and Sentai Filmworks for a period, and he was most known for sometimes rewriting his dubs in outrageous and mean spirited ways, or other times translating the original dialogue verbatim while not even bothering to have his actors try and match their lip flaps. He earned a lot of good will early on for the famous Ghost Stories dub, before going steadily downhill with his downright awful dubs of Clannad, Angel Beats and Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere. He’s retired from the game now, having gone out with a published interview that’s overstuffed with both salt and sour grapes over how his tenure ended in a flaming mountain of otaku rage.
As for Highschool of the Dead, it kind of follows both of his common trends? It has a reputation for being one of his total ground-up rewrites, but what I’ve noticed while planning this review is that the dialogue is mostly faithful, and becomes increasingly so over the course of the series. I think the only reason it has that reputation is because the portions of rewritten dialogue are so immediately terrible, they stick out in your mind so much that they just FEEL like the majority of the series. I’d give you some examples, but come on, the rewritten bits are so noticeable that you shouldn’t even need to watch the sub to know the difference. If you’re hearing excessive and repetitive profanity, nonsensical references to everything from movies to memes to Bush-era politics, or the suspicious dancing-around of potentially heavy topics, it’s Foster dialogue.
The weirdest rewrite happens about halfway through the series, right after the obligatory ‘female cast bathes together and liberally gropes each other’ scene, where some of the female characters get drunk. It’s implied in the sub, but completely scrubbed from the dub, with the excuse that visibly intoxicated characters are just ‘exhausted.’ The reason this hits so weird is because during this sequence, the adult teacher sexually assaults two of her underage male students, and while I’m not saying being drunk is a GOOD excuse for that sort of thing, it’s still better than NO excuse. In any case, as bad as Foster’s reimagined script may be, it doesn’t NOT work. This is an outrageous and offensive show, so why not have an outrageous and offensive dub? It’s kind of like J Michael Tatum with the Steins;Gate dub; Sure it’s a shitty dub that features all of its creator’s worst tendencies, but by some happy accident, it just happens to fit the material. Foster’s dub gives HOTD a stronger personality, with the caveat that not all personalities are good personalities.
Anyway, Flecknoe aside, the only other bad apple in the bunch is one of my least favorite voice actors, Mark X Laskowski, playing Kouta Hirano. His delivery is either over-the-top or completely flat, not depending on the scene, but depending on the line. Leraldo Anzualda has had a ton of experience as a lead role, he knows how to portray both leadership strength and a down to earth personality. The sultry and smoky-voiced Taylor Hannah is outstanding as Saeko, which is why it’s so damn disappointing that this was the last character she ever played before leaving the industry entirely. Jessica Boone nails every character she plays, so of course she gets lost in the nuances of Rei, Monica Rial was clearly having a lot of fun as the ditzy nurse Shizuku, and while this was probably one of Brittney Karbowski’s earliest roles, she shows off her emotional range with a thoroughly sincere performance as a little girl scarred by her father’s untimely death. I want to be clear, this dub is very much a mixed bag, and that’s not the only time I’ll be using that phrase in this review. My best advice is to watch the first episode in English, and if you don’t like what you hear, stick to sub the rest of the way through.
Because yeah, that’s exactly what this anime is, a mixed bag. If you were to look up ‘mixed bag’ in the dictionary, you’d find the definition of the term mixed bag, which this anime fucking is(See Foster? I can make lame movie references too). Highschool of the Dead is one of those anime that are really hard to talk about critically, because holding it to pretty much any literary standard feels like pooping in the punch bowl. It’s wildly inconsistent in terms of both quality and especially tone, and while there may be a lot to love about it, pretty much everything it does well comes with some huge caveats. For one thing, it is, for the most part, a good zombie story. HOTD came out in 2010, right smack dab at the peak of the zombie media craze, and it hit really strongly. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that the high school setting is overused in the anime medium, and zombie media has been used for generations to satirize aspects of contemporary culture, so casting a group of high school anime archetypes as a zombie apocalypse survivors group with several time-tested zombie tropes as a fun twist was just what the busty doctor ordered.
This gives the show a strong narrative foundation, and the way the writers handled the highschool element going forward was equally important, as the characters do not hole up in their school for the entire series... They stay on the move, and yet in doing so, their interactions often still carry some degree of high school dynamics, so it doesn’t feel like the story is ever abandoning or being repressed by its original concept. They also go a step further by presenting a unique take on zombie biology, as the zombies in this show are only capable of hunting by sound, but unfortunately, that’s where we hit our first major problem... This is one fucking stupid zombie apocolypse. It’s explained early on that these zombies are blind, yet somehow they have the coordination to walk up stairs? Somehow they’re able to swarm people who aren’t being particularly noisy? But okay, let’s go with this. If they are blind, they can’t feel temperatures, and they can’t smell prey that’s a foot in front of them, this would be the shortest zombie apocolypse of all time. All it would take is one zombie knocking over a stack of plates for the entire horde to gang up and eat each other to death.
Not to mention, it would be incredibly easy to manipulate a horde of blind zombies through some very simple tactics, but they’re tactics that you rarely see characters actually use. But while we’re on the subject of characters, the main cast is pretty strong overall. With the exception of Arisu, the six main characters aren’t just based on common archetypes, they’re based on a blend of archetypes, which mix together surprisingly well, and create several opportunities for nuance and unique personalities, which the writer did take advantage of. This leads not only to the main cast showing unexpected levels of depth, but some old and genuinely tired tropes and cliches being examined in a new light. There are several examples I could offer of this, but for the sake of brevity, I’m going to specifically highlight the ecchi and harem aspects of the series, because yes, this zombie action thriller is also a harem fanservice show.
As for the fanservice, you can barely go thirty seconds without giant bouncing tits, panty shots and cleavage close-ups being shoved in your face, but it never feels THAT overwhelming because there’s a kind of tongue-in-cheek cheesiness to just how shameless the presentation of the fanservice is, so there’s nothing insidious about it. It’s all on the surface, and you’re told pretty much from the beginning of the first episode what you’re in for in terms of content, and I kind of respect that. On top of which, with the exception of a pretty groan-worthy bath scene, most of the fanservice happens in action scenes where the female characters are gloriously active, and in some genuinely thoughtful character interactions, so while you may be ogling them, you’re also learning who they are and why you should care about them at the same time. The fanservice is there, it’s never not there, but the girls aren’t there just to be sexualized, that’s not a part of who they are, which is way too often the case in a lot of other anime. They don’t serve the ecchi, they serve the action and the plot, and the ecchi is just along for the ride.
Now, you could make a very easy argument that it doesn’t need to be there in the first place, but this is anime we’re talking about, and I do think there is a much better balance in this show than there is in most ecchi fare. As for the harem element, it’s there, but it feels kind of downplayed. Every female character who was around in the first episode shows some interest in Takashi, but it’s usually fairly brief, and it doesn’t define or override who they are.
Hell, the fact that the childhood friend doesn’t start out hopelessly in love with him is a nice touch all its own, as in most anime Rei would be obsessed with him to the point of winning him or dying alone, where in a refreshing role-reversal, it's actually Takashi who's hung up. Takashi himself isn’t your typical harem lead, he shows more natural and relatable reactions to harem situations he finds himself in than at least 90% of the harem protagonist population. And Kouta is way more than just a girl-crazy loser best friend.
Actually, now that I think about it, there is something in the inconsistency of this series that betrays the reason why it works as well as it does. Hell, I'd go as far as to say this is one of the few anime I've seen where tonal dissonance actually works in its favor. The zombie apocalypse falls apart if you think about it too hard, but it is still executed well in the narrative, and it helps to keep the story exciting and move the pace along. The fact that a terrified and confused human race is often a bigger threat than the zombies itself is a cornerstone of the zombie genre, and while it’s represented here in both chillingly subtle and laughably over the top ways, both approaches serve the narrative as well as provide a ton of world-building that never feels jarring or out of place. The characters have depth beyond their most immediate identities, even though depending where you are in the story they’re either terribly or insightfully written, either dealing with their very real trauma or throwing melodramatic tantrums, being sexualized while they’re being humanized, and it all comes together almost seemlessly not because the series is well written, but because it’s fucking SINCERE.
This show doesn’t feel like some cheesy schlock that was unleashed into the world as a cheap excuse to sell violence and sex for a profit. This feels like a passion project. I’ll never personally know any of the people who were involved in producing, writing or directing this anime, but I can feel how hard they believed in it. I haven’t read the manga, but I get the strong feeling that Dai Sato’s original vision was way more than just silly, sexy gore porn. He had to have had fun writing this story, exploring his characters and the world around them, even if he did so from a mostly immature perspective. He wanted cheesecake, but he also wanted the material to have actual quality to support it. On top of that, you have the inspired and borderline genius direction of Tetsuro Araki, whose sense of pacing and execution was so whip-smart that you barely even notice the lack of plot or the meandering story. This is an anime that believes in itself, with consistent and whole-hearted sincerity, and by openly celebrating its own immaturity instead of pretending to be something it’s not, it gives you every reason to believe in it too.
Highschool of the Dead is available from Sentai Filmworks, and can be streamed on Hulu... Or, if you have a particularly dark sense of humor, you can stream it on Hulu THROUGH a Disney+ subscription. There’s also an OVA episode called Drifters of the Dead, where the cast is stuck on an island, and it’s basically just softcore porn with the boobs covered up. There’s no second season, and unfortunately, due to the untimely passing of the original mangaka leaving the source material unfinished, we’re probably never going to get one.
I’m sorry if this review was all over the place, but in my defense, this is a show that’s all over the place, and it’s kind of hard to discuss critically. It’s a mixed bag full of both good and bad elements that ultimately don’t fit perfectly together, but why would you want them to? If you want a genuinely amazing, critically acclaimed and emotionally resonant zombie anime, you can always watch School Live. Highschool of the Dead is just fun. You watch this show because you want to watch a band of highly likeable survivors brave the undead wilderness and become closer friends throughout it all. You watch this for a fast paced story full of exciting action and suspense. It’s messy, and it’s shitty, and it’s immature, but it feels like it’s supposed to be messy, shitty, and immature. Sometimes you don’t want to eat at a four star restaurant, sometimes a greasy burger at a bar is the most satisfying thing in the world, and that’s this anime. It is exactly what it wants to be, and it’s gorram good at it.
I give Highschool of the Dead a 7/10.
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