Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
Oh thank god, an unequivocal winner.
Listen; there have been a few things this season that I thought were decent, or have potential. Some have even been pretty good. But most of what’s premiered so far this season has been bad. Very bad. Evidence of the production bubble at its absolute bubbliest, some of which barely even functions as coherent television.
But we’re not here to talk about those anime, which I’m not going to even bother to name. It is really nice, and much more important, to have a premiere that is just no-frills awesome. There are a few complaints one could make, and I’ll get to those, but for the most part Zom 100, the debut series from brand-new studio BUG FILMS (but directed by the formerly OLM-affiliated Kazuki Kawagoe, of Komi Can’t Communicate fame), is just a kickass premiere with a ton of style and energy that sets up a lot of interesting possibilities for its world and its main character, the now-ex-salaryman Akira Tendou [Shuichirou Umeda]. It’s easily the strongest premiere of the season, and you could argue it’s the strongest of the entire year without much trouble.
The premise here is very simple. Akira joins a commercial production company after graduating college. This is his dream job, he wants to write commercial scenarios and make big bucks off of it. (I’m not gonna pretend I intuitively understand that, but hey, live and let live.) At first blush, the company he joins seems pretty good. He’s got motivated coworkers, a pretty company senior, one Saori Ootori [Sora Amamiya], in another department that he harbors a huge crush on from the moment their eyes meet, and, as mentioned, this is the career he’s always wanted to have. Things seem to be going okay.
Of course, they’re not, actually. He discovers quite quickly that the corporation he works for is a “black company,” although he’s strongly in denial about it. He and his coworkers pull lengthy all-nighters, sometimes for several days in a row, without overtime pay. Many of them are addled with addictions to energy boosters, and they openly brag to each other about their poor health. His boss is a truly, profoundly arrogant Middle Manager type who screams his head off at the slightest excuse. Oh, and his boss is having an affair with Saori. Sometimes they even go at it in the office itself. Gross.
So, all told, Akira is decidedly not having a good time, and the show, rather than just having him monologue, shows us this directly. As he keeps losing more and more sleep, he gets bags under his eyes, his movements become sluggish, and his gaze bugs out. The rare spare hours he has are spent binging movies on his laptop, as he’s too tired to do much of anything else. Days pile into weeks, which pile into months, and then years. Three years into his job, Akira’s days pass in a wholly undifferentiated depressive blur. Long work hours slaving over constantly-rewritten commercial scripts crash into shouting superiors, grainy late-night commercials, mental health PSAs, and zombie movies.
Eventually, they bleed into each other; the world fades to monochrome and the television won’t display anything but a mass of writhing scribbles, and the sound of Akira’s boss screaming at him. As he goes to sleep every night he sincerely prays that he just won’t wake up. Our man is out-and-out suicidal, no subtext here, that’s just true. Through all of this, the world remains in a fuzzed out black and white.
And then, one day, prompted by his bike being confiscated because he forgot to pay for his parking space, he wanders into his landlord’s apartment.
And promptly sees her corpse being gnawed on by the living dead. No time is devoted to how’s or why’s—the zombie apocalypse is upon us.
Akira is thrilled.
Color returns to his world as insane hyper-violence unfolds all around him. He dashes through his apartment complex, dodging the living dead as he climbs up to the roof top just in time to see a huge passenger plane go down. The whole time, he effortlessly fights off the zombies that actually try to attack him, and he’s absolutely ecstatic, practically walking on air and claiming that he sees the world in color for the first time in forever, adding “red blood” to the traditional “blue sky, green trees” chestnut. The world has ended, and Akira is free. (If that seems like a little much in terms of physical feats for an office worker, please know that Akira biked to work every day and played rugby in college. After whole generations of otaku-caricature protagonists filling the everyman role, it’s nice to have a self-described jock playing the lead instead.)
He has one lingering tie he wants to sever to the old world before deciding what to do next, and that’s with his crush, a flame he’s kept alive for these three years, Saori. Combing through the records at his old office, he finds her address and bikes over to check on her. He is, plainly put, too late, both Saori and Akira’s old boss alike have been zombified before he gets there. Even this, though, is bizarrely heartening. There’s an absolutely amazing laugh-out-loud moment here, where Akira encounters the bloated zombie of his boss. And he dramatically—even gracefully!—announces his “resignation” from his office job, and then promptly gives him a fucking incredible rugby tackle, pushing him out a window, and flashing back to his college days as the dead bastard goes flying onto the streets below.
His reunion with Saori’s zombie is more bittersweet, confessing to the now-dead OL that he’s kept her in his heart all these years. With that, and a theatrical—weirdly emotional?—cry of “goodbye, my first love!” he flees from her zombie, as he can’t bring himself to hurt her, even in her current state.
Settling down at an abandoned convenience store, he loots some food and, more importantly, a notebook and a marker. Akira is not one to stay in one place, now that the red tape of society has broken down. He’s got things he wants to do.
100 of them, in fact.
Throughout, the premiere never lets up for even a single second. We are practically hard-wired into Akira’s own brain through the entire sequence of events here, from optimistic entrance to the workforce, total burnout, and gleeful liberation as the zombie apocalypse breaks out. He might be totally delusional about how much fun he’s going to have, but honestly, I kind of feel him!
I don’t have an office job, but I’ve been struggling against a different kind of bureaucracy for years at this point. (If you’ve never tried to live anywhere in the US without a driver’s license or equivalent thereof, and cannot get one for complicated reasons, I do not recommend the experience. It sucks, and is the root cause of almost all of my personal problems.) Maybe I’d jump for joy if the world ended, too! Maybe I’d be right there with him.
That’s not to say the premiere is completely flawless. There’s arguably some Stuff going on with the writing of women here. Akira himself doesn’t judge Saori for sleeping with her boss (those kind of abuses of power are uniformly the superior’s fault anyway), so he’s in the clear, but the show itself sure sees fit to kill her for that. I’d want more evidence before strongly claiming that Zom 100 has “an issue with writing women,” but you could build a case if you wanted to. I’m not yet inclined to, but it’s worth at least keeping in mind.
Honestly though, even that much feels like a quibble. There’s an interesting, instructive difference between Zom 100 and last season’s big post-apoc show, Heavenly Delusion. That series, which I did not write about extensively, seems to float the thesis that people are people even in desperate situations. That can be a good or a bad thing, depending on what that person and that situation are, (and that series puts its characters in some very dire situations indeed) but it seems to treat this as an immutable fact. Zom 100, which is after all, an action-comedy anime, takes a much more optimistic view of the dim future. Maybe, it says, things will be better. Maybe, in such a dire circumstance, we could finally find the time, the energy, and the courage, to do the things we really want to do. It’s not an intellectual argument, it’s one from the heart.
And honestly? Part of me finds that more convincing. Maybe, indeed.
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