Fedranime reviews
High school of the
dead
Interesting fact about myself. I’m deathly afraid of horror
movies and yet I pride myself on not getting scared by horror anime. I first
noticed this when I was watching Hellsing Ultimate and my only thought on seeing
Seras defeat her mortal enemy Zorin Blitz was by slaughtering her army,
punching her in the throat several times, biting off her fingers, and then
cheese grating her face against a wall. My only thought during this was “COOL!
That’s what you get when you mess with Dracula’s servant!” After a while I
figured if it was impossible for me to be scared if it was anime. High school
of the dead immediately changed that opinion.
High school of the dead is an anime based off the manga by
Daisuke and Shoji Sato and animated by Studio Madhouse, one of my favorite
animators. The story follows Takashi, Rei, Saeko,
Saya, and Kohta and one nurse as they try to survive in a Japan were undead
civilians who they call “Them” are
appearing. Obviously they aren’t familiar with the word “Zombie” even though
there are numerous references to zombie movies. The plot is basically about
them all trying to survive, find out what caused the zombies (I will be calling
them that for the rest of the review) to appear and find other survivors.
I haven’t really watched that much of H.S.O.T.D. so far, in
fact right now I’m about halfway through episode 2, but it’s really good. The
animation is just incredible, as to be expected from madhouse. This is also
about the only time that CGI has worked in an anime in my opinion. Sorry One
Piece, it just make the Thousand Sunny look really weird and sloppy. This is
also an amazingly heart wrenching anime. In the first episode there were these
2 girls running away holding fingers from the zombies saying, “Oh unnamed
character #1 were such great friends/sisters! Let’s use the power of friendship
to save our self from the zombies!” Originally I thought, “Alright start the
count down. They’re both going to be trapped and be symbolically dragged apart
from each other screaming the other characters name until the zombies are done
with them.” I then watched as the zombies came up the stairs and grabbed one of
them. She then asked the other for help to which she then responded “LET GO OF
ME!” and kicked her down the stairs only for the zombies to then be right
behind her. This was easily on of the best scenes in the episode and left me
emotionally satisfied as the sense of horror came across me. There’s also a
scene where Takashi’s best friend gets bitten and slowly becomes a zombie
forcing him to put him down. With scenes like this I really like this anime!
Unfortunately, there are a few problems. I’m just going to
address the main one here, the fanservice. In anime there usually is mild
fanservice and generally doesn’t make a big fuss about it. H.S.O.T.D. takes
that principle and runs it’s face against a wall. Honestly, sometimes I’m not
sure if they added this in the anime to kind of make fun of the fanservice in
horror movies or if this was in the manga I never read. It really gets confusing
when the school nurse, who oddly enough looks like Elesa from Pokémon, when the
producers thought it was a good idea to have her make a sound affect every time
she even takes a step. That also brings up my next problem, the school nurse.
In first 5 minutes on screen with dialogue a student bravely sacrifices his
life for her saying she needs to get help to which she then says, “Who are you?”
You died in vane man. You died in vane. Aside from that there’s just a few
issues like the profanity and how Kohta was able to turn a nail gun into an Uzi
in about 5 seconds but it’s still pretty good.
All in all, High school of the dead is still very good. The
animation is awesome, it has a very good dub, the soundtrack is really
memorable and most of the characters are likeable. One thing I really like is
the way the work in references to other horror works. In fact until I just
looked up his name, I found out Kohta’s last name is Hirano, Kohta Hirano made
Hellsing, one of my favorite anime. I can definitely recommend this to anyone
who loves horror anime. That’s it for this edition of Fedranime reviews. Catch
you later.
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