This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.
When people talk about bonds, this is what they mean, isn’t it?
At just 40 minutes long, Alice in Deadly School only barely qualifies for this column, but I’m bending the rules for a reason here. Not a single thing about this OVA makes a lick of sense. In origin alone, it stands as a notable example of how odd the margins of the mainstream anime industry can get, stemming as it does from post-apoc idol show also-ran Gekidol (which, full disclosure, I haven’t seen). A friend called it the best anime of the year. Another absolutely hates it. It takes a truly special kind of anime to inspire strong feelings on both ends of the whatever-number-out-of-ten spectrum like that. And whatever else one may say about it, “special” is a word that describes Alice in Deadly School to a tee.
It tiptoes over the course of three or so different genres during its brief runtime, has a nowhereman visual style that, if you didn’t know, you could conceivably place anywhere from the past 20 years of mainstream anime, and is utterly fucking heartbreaking. I’ve tried to avoid using this phrase much over the course of the past year writing for this blog, as I was guilty of trotting it out too often in 2020, but the fact of the matter is that there just isn’t much like this.
Premisewise, at least, it has some ancestors. “Zombie outbreak at a high school” is not new ground for anime and manga; a cursory glance at anything from the infamous High School of the Dead to Dowman Sayman’s black comedy one shot “Girls’ Night Out of The Living Dead” will tell you that much. It’s hard to even argue that Alice in Deadly School brings much new to the table from this angle. Crossbreeding that particular premise with the girls’ club school-life genre has been done before too (see 2015’s SCHOOL-LIVE!). What Alice offers is lightning-electric resonance. Do you feel doomed every single day because of the relentless onslaught of soul-crushingly miserable news that permeates our lives, from the outrageously petty to the globally catastrophic? I have a pretty strong feeling that the people who made Alice do too.
The term “zombie” itself is never used–standard for the genre these days–but it’s pretty clear what the creepy undead Things taking over the high school Alice takes place in are. Our cast then, naturally, are the outbreak’s few survivors. The main focus is on the “manzai club”, in truth just a pair of girls–Yuu and Nobuko–who aspire to be a manzai duo.
They’re hardly the only characters (and I’m doing the film a disservice by only briefly mentioning the Softball Club duo here), but they’re the two most important. Through their eyes, we see the broken-down remnants of the high school’s world, and their character interactions are great too. Some of this is funny; the OVA opens with the two riffing about why melonbread doesn’t actually have any melons in it. (Because a melon is too large, of course.) Some if it is melancholy; the two ruminate on their pasts more than once, and we find out that Yuu lost her mother some time ago. Some of it is just upsetting; the pair also witness the zombie of a former classmate being shot through the head, and the OVA’s whole color palette goes black, white, and blood-splatter red in the aftermath.
About that; Alice has a tendency to warp its visual style toward whatever emotion the story is trying to convey in the moment. This is not at all rare in anime (or in film in general). In 2021 alone, works as diverse as Super Cub and Sonny Boy have done it to lesser or great degrees. But a case this extreme in an OVA whose visual style is otherwise pretty grounded is notable, especially with regard to the backgrounds, which often take on a hand-painted look when the film needs to move away from “reality” to convey a particularly strong emotion; nostalgia, sadness, disquiet, etc.
As Alice ticks on, its cast hatch a plan to escape the titular deadly school. This part of the OVA particularly is rather straightforward, but it works.
Who says kids don’t need to know Chemistry?
And as Alice in Deadly School nears its end, I face a particular challenge.
You see, conveying why something hits you emotionally is hard. It’s arguably my entire job, but that doesn’t make it easier in cases like this. There are a lot of anime that end with a character death. It’s not rare, and most of the time it does little for me. I tend to consider it a little cheap; something of a writer’s shortcut. An easy way to tug on your audience’s heartstrings and also ditch a character you’ve run out of ideas for at the same time. It’s only rarely actually objectionable, but it’s one of the immortal tools of literature that does the least for me.
So when I actually am hit by one, I have to really sit and think about why.
Nobuko dies near Alice in Deadly School‘s very, very end. We don’t even see it on screen, but it’s clear that she’s contracted the virus and is starting to slip. Her and Yuu’s final conversation–in a strange, green dreamspace that is mostly in Yuu’s own mind–is devastating. One of the film’s key themes is that dreams, even if we don’t achieve them, can keep us going through even the worst times in our lives. Nobuko’s is her shared dream with Yuu, to be a comedy duo, and it tangibly, provably, does not happen.
But Yuu can carry on–though not without heartache–because Nobuko’s spirit, her own aspirations, live on inside her. Alice seems to offer the minor salve that perhaps no one is truly dead if they’re remembered. The final piece falls into place here, in one of the year’s single most….I don’t even really know. Brilliant? Audacious? Just plain weird? Artistic decisions; an apparent riff on the Love Live! series’ famous “Kotori photobomb”, here reappropriated as a symbol that no matter when those close to us may leave our lives, we will always carry a piece of them with us. It’s contrasted with a final cut to the reality of the situation; Yuu posing by herself in front of an empty swing set.
This theme of carrying your torch as long as it’ll stay lit bears out in a few other ways near the OVA’s conclusion, too. A character whose lifelong goal was to become an idol finds herself trapped in the school’s announcement room, and sings her heart out over the school broadcast system even as she’s actively succumbing to the virus. She imagines herself in a pastel pink music video even as she’s literally bleeding from the neck. For a single moment, she is who she’s always wanted to be. And then she’s gone, and her song ends like the flip of a lightswitch.
So is Alice in Deadly School ultimately a hopeful work? It’s a bit hard to say, but I’d like to think so, although maybe “cautiously optimistic” is a better way to think of it. The girls who escape only do so after they give up on any hope of outside help and basically rescue themselves. If we take Alice as an allegory for our fears about the future of the world–and goodness could it apply to a lot of them, as is a long-standing tradition in zombie fiction–maybe the message is that action is our only option. Then again, the girls flee to a nearby mall, apparently being maintained as a shelter by some other group of people. So perhaps the takeaway is that we can only survive with the help of others, but that we need to take the effort to actually reach out into our own hands.
The real brilliance of course is that you can take all that and more from Alice in Deadly School. It’s a truly fascinating little film. Not unlike a certain other short-form anime project that I covered not quite yet a year ago, it reads as a eulogy to those who are gone from the ones who are still alive, although its scope is broader. It offers a small hope; maybe some of us can make it out of all this alive. And for those who’ll die either way? Perhaps we can at least go out on our own terms. The same, really, could be said of Alice itself.
It seems doubtful that the film (or its parent series) will ever pick up much of a following. Weird little OVA projects like this almost never do, at least not over here in the Anglosphere. But for 40 minutes, it’s one of the strangest, most resonant, and yeah, one of the best anime of 2021. That counts for something. Hold it in your hearts.
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