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Meanderings
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Thursday, 09 September 2010 09:02 |
 The idea behind High School of the Dead is simple enough: unleash the Zombie Apocalypse™, gather up a small group of high school kids, and see how well they can survive. In practice this makes for a cast with a certain attitude - natural selection means that the weak and timid aren't going to last long - so it has to be said that the group we end up with aren't the most charismatic of people. They do, though, make for an interesting bunch to follow as they scheme, stab & bludgeon their way through the zombie hordes, finally making it out of the school and into the city beyond by the end of episode three. Of course, with the whole world apparently taking up shambling full-time, you do have to wonder how long they'll survive for.
What surprises me most with the series is that it's surprisingly intelligent. I was drawn to it initially because it is, frankly, a tits & ass fanfest, topped with lashings of gore. That's fine, they're both ideas that play well with anime fans, and with scenes like the immensely silly bullet-time sequence the story is clearly playing to a certain audience. But underpinning all that is a sense that someone's done their homework, and understands the basics of human psychology enough to give us what seems to be an accurate description of how people would respond in such a life-threatening situation - the initial adrenaline surge, the urge to live that soon comes to override the basic niceties of human behaviour, the need to turn to others you can trust in a time of extreme need - and the mental meltdowns that inevitably occur when you give reality a chance to sink in. Now I can't claim to have survived the Zombie Apocalypse, but the way the series portrays its characters just feels right. Add to that the high production values, and the aforementioned tits, ass and gore, and you have a winning combination. I'm hooked, and the sooner someone gets this out on Blu-ray in the UK the happier I'll be.
 But. Butbutbutbutbut.
Let's step back a little. Zombies in entertainment are big business - the hype around and success of Zombieland is probably the most recent example of that, but the abilities of the undead to draw an audience go back for years. It's a cult audience, of course, but I'd hazard a guess that the audience for a good zombie tale is an order of magnitude beyond what most anime titles can attract. The opportunity exists - existed - for High School of the Dead to tap into that market, but in loading the series down with that glorious fanservice that keeps so many anime fans happy, I believe the producers have missed the opportunity to push the series to a wider audience, and wasted the perfect opportunity to create a breakthrough / crossover hit.
Like many anime fans, I'm sure, I spend a lot of time fielding snarky comments and put-downs from people about how anime somehow equals porn. Never mind Cardcaptor Sakura, Pokemon or the other 95% of shows we could dig out that are perfectly harmless - the world outside anime fandom remembers Urotsukidoji and hentai titles far more persistently than anything else. Whenever I try to introduce friends to anime - even something as iconic as Cowboy Bebop - that's the attitude I have to get past first, and it takes just the briefest of pantyshots for me to be reminded that "See, it's all just porn!". The setting and zombie-killing aspects of High School of the Dead would, under normal circumstances, make it the perfect series for me to show to seven or eight people as an example of good anime, but take the T&A into account and it's just not worth it - I wouldn't even get past the opening credits before the sniping started. And in such ways a potentially huge wider audience is lost.
 We're hearing all the time how the anime industry is in trouble, how companies are going to the wall one after the other. To survive in such times, surely the production companies need to take opportunities to reach that wider audience, and grasp them with both hands, instead of purely pandering to the existing fanbase? I enjoy HSoTD's OTT fanservice, absolutely, but I wouldn't have missed it if it hadn't been there - the series does the rest of the Zombie Apocalypse thing more than well enough to stand without it. But that would have needed the anime's producers to take a risk, breaking with the source manga's style (which would always create something of a backlash) for the chance of greater rewards. They chose not to do that - and as much as I love what they have produced, that makes me sad.
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Backbites 
