Once again, I'm fashionably late to the scene of writing first impressions posts for the new anime season. This post is for Highschool of the Dead, a zombie-survival series based on the manga written by Daisuke Sato and illustrated by Shouji Sato. Nothing like a random slap in the face to make her realize that she was better off without you loves you, right? It's lunch time! Premise: A bunch of high school students try to survive a zombie apocalypse. Brief summery of the first episode: Takashi is regular 17-yer-old high school student. He goes to same school as his childhood friend Rei who he secretly likes. Rei also has feelings for Takashi, but because of his inaction she eventually started dating Takashi's friend Hisashi, causing an awkwardness between the three. One day, their high school comes under attack and the students and teachers are being killed and turned into zombies. Takashi, Rei and Hisashi make their way to school roof to hold out against the zombies, and during the journey Hisashi is bitten by a zombie. After the three have barricaded themselves on the roof, Hisashi succumbs to the wound and turns into a zombie, forcing Takashi to smash his head open with a baseball bat. Takashi killing Hisashi causes Rei to become slightly crazed, but she quickly regains her senses and wants Takashi to stay by her side. Zombies make good target for batting practice. Despite being distraught and a little crazy, Rei does pick to best option available. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A pretty good beginning to the series. As expected of a Madhouse production, the animation quality was excellent. I loved the shaky camera work and the panning shots used in the episode. They did a good job conveying the zombie apocalypse atmosphere. The episode featured plenty of blood, violence, and fan service which are trademarks of the series. The action has a lot of biting, stabbing, baseball smashing and blood spraying everywhere, but there actually wasn't much gore. I think it's the same case with the manga: it's violent, but you probably won't lose your lunch over it since there's no entrails dragging around or anything like that, and that's probably a good thing. I found the fan service element to be quite amusing, since they seem a little out of place given what's happening in the story. In the middle of violence and carnage, the camera will zoom into a girl's boobs, butt, or panties even though she is fighting for her life, and it's kind of funny. Given that the manga is pretty successful, I'm guessing the combination of zombie violence and fan service actually has a decent amount of appeal. As for the story, the first episode tosses the audience right into the chaos. We receive glimpses of the other supporting characters, but the episode was focused on Takashi, Rei, and Hisashi and the love triangle between them. The awkwardness between these three characters can be easily seen, although it was bizarre how Takashi came out of nowhere to slap Rei. The love triangle was resolved pretty quickly though as Hisashi was dumb enough to try to choke out a zombie and got turned into one himself, giving Takashi an excuse to get rid of him. Highschool of the Dead looks promising so far. I'm just in it for the action and maybe fan service, but it wouldn't hurt if the story develops a bit. Since it's only 13 episodes, I'll follow the show for the season. I'll probably blog about it too since the only other show I'm planning to cover is Sekirei. I have to cover some anime in order for this site to be an anime and manga blog. From the feed of A Product of Wasted Time
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