The Summer 2023 Anime Preview Guide

Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead

Surviving a zombie apocalypse beats being a wage slave any day. After spending years slaving away for a soul-crushing company, Akira's life has lost its luster. He lives in a trash-filled apartment, his pay is abysmal, and he can't even muster up the nerve to confess his love to his beautiful co-worker. But when a zombie apocalypse ravages his town, it gives him the push he needs to live for himself. Now Akira's on a mission to complete all 100 items on his bucket list before he...well, kicks the bucket.

Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead is based on Haro Aso and Kotaro Takata's Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead (Zom 100: Zombie ni Naru Made ni Shitai 100 no Koto) manga. It streams on Hulu, Netflix, and Crunchyroll on Sundays.

About halfway through the premiere of Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead, we arrive at the triumphant climax that the episode has been building to from its opening frame. After three years of back-breaking, soul-crushing work at a company that has sucked all of the life and joy from him, Akira Tendo has discovered that Japan has been engulfed in an apocalyptic outbreak of undead slaughter. Akira is overjoyed instead of being consumed by fear, grief, or despair. Not only is this the first day off he's had in over 150 weeks, but it's also the first time in who knows how long he has felt alive. He careens through the chaos and bloodshed with a smile on his face, screaming, “I'm free!” from the top of his lungs.

Friends, I cannot tell you how much I felt that in the moment. It was because of the episode's excellent cinematic direction, its creative and stylish visuals, or even the depth of feeling it has for its protagonist and the other poor workaday Joes trapped in the same cycle of living to work instead of working to live. It was because, in short, I felt free from the disappointing and lifeless anime premieres that we've been drowning in all week (a very small handful of exceptions notwithstanding).

I lost count of all the little extra touches that added so much to the energy of this opening chapter of Zom 100. However, I think my favorite was the way that the shards of glass that shattered when Akira threw his zombified boss out of a window reflected fragments of Akira's high school memories back when he played rugby. It was a nice visual flourish to add more character to the proceedings and a handy reminder of why Akira is so athletic and skilled at the leaps and kicks he'll need to keep performing in this apocalyptic hellscape. Other anime, please take notes: That is how you use the “visual” aspect of your visual medium to tell a “story” with “characterization” that makes your protagonist “interesting” and “likable.”

This one has it all. Excellent production values, sharp writing, biting (heheh) social commentary, and more shambling meat bags to pummel to (re)death than you can shake a stick at. The star ratings that we dole out for Preview Guide aren't indicative of a show's overall quality, of course; we've only got one or two episodes to go on, after all. Instead, they indicate how good of a job a first episode does at convincing viewers to keep on watching in the coming weeks. As such, Zom 100 has handily earned the highest rating I can give. I cannot wait to see more.

You know your job is soul-crushing when the zombie apocalypse is the best thing to ever happen to you. That's the position Akira Tendo is in when he wakes up one morning to discover that the world has gone to brain-munching hell overnight, and this first episode does a remarkable job of showing us why. Akira is a zombie in his own right in his career, a corporate drone who is expected to work until he breaks. Over the first fifteen-odd minutes, we see him go from a bright-eyed new worker to a brain-dead zombie slogging through his routine. He barely gets to go home. When he does, he lives in squalor, and every day he's at the mercy of sadistic bosses who don't give a damn about anything but the bottom line. It's the sort of brutal existence that we've seen in countless isekai stories, and while it's still functioning as a prologue here, it's also miles ahead of what most shows depict. Akira's life is horrific, and he feels utterly trapped in it.

The art direction here is fascinating and does a remarkable job of emphasizing the decline of Akira's quality of life and its sudden resurgence. We start in full color, but the colors slowly leech from the screen as things get worse for him. By the time the zombies appear, everything is in black and white. Then little splashes of color begin to surface, showing us how Akira is beginning to realize that with the fall of Japan comes a new freedom for him. Blood isn't just red; it's blue, green, yellow, and purple, like the zombies have all been splashed with paint rather than bodily fluids. It's celebratory, a sign of Akira's release from hell, and by the time the screen is back to full color, he's regained the verve he had in the beginning.

Zombie stories aren't always my favorite, but I enjoy it when they do something different – Sankarea and School-Live! are two examples of series that took just a unique enough approach that they worked. This one is setting out to separate itself from the herd, and not just with its use of fast zombies who lurch at terrifying speeds. They're the impetus for Akira to come back to life, something that the use of color demonstrates, and I like that it takes a zombie apocalypse to get out of his rut. Change isn't always easy, and as some of us remember from the pandemic's start, enforced change can allow us to try new things or to do something we've been putting off. I think zombie tales hit differently post-pandemic, and while this one doesn't seem to be doing anything but pointing out that sometimes it takes a catastrophe to push someone into action, it's still a good take. It's gross in places, and it has a brief moment of suicide ideation, but I think this one is going to be good.

Zom 100 goes hard. Like, really hard, from the very first minute. The story itself is pretty straightforward: Akira, our hero, spends three years working for an abusive company that slowly drains his soul until one day, the zombie apocalypse happens and, in a moment of divine irony, Akira realizes this has finally freed him from the shackles of exploitative labor. It's exactly the kind of setup many other zom-coms have played with before, but through sheer artistic delivery, this episode stands out beautifully.

There are a lot of things to praise about the direction here, but the most important is how it's able to zero in on Akira's mental state. We're along for the roller-coaster ride as he transforms from a wide-eyed new hire to a dead-eyed office drone, seeing the zest of life and dreams slowly crumble under the indifferent demands of overwork and abuse. There's a certain level of nihilism central to this premise – cheery nihilism, of course – and communicating the deadening and demoralizing nature of Akira's workplace is critical to making the emotional swerve here work. When he realizes the end of the world also means to end of work, it's a genuinely inspiring moment where the light returns to his eyes and color bursts back into the world. The wild animation of the zombies, and the artistic decision to color all the gore like spray paint, all work to sell it not just as spectacle but as emotional catharsis.

It's the kind of adaptation treatment that elevates what worked about the source material. Zom 100 is simple, a bit trashy, and doesn't do much to innovate in the well-trodden ground of zombie fiction, but it has a solid emotional core and an excess of energy. All of that's on display here, refined through playful cinematography – there are plenty of obvious and subtle homages to classic zombie films – that makes it infectiously fun. Witnessing Akira rediscover the joys of life, be it a simple blue sky or confessing to his crush('s zombified husk), is positively joyful, even as the world burns and bleeds around him. If you're inclined to take this 100% seriously, it will probably be off-putting just how cavalier Akira is about the end of the world. Still, if you've ever worked a job where you legitimately hoped the building would catch fire just so you didn't have to clock in, then there's an undeniable release to seeing that happen for our hero.

It's a rather dark joke when you think about it, but Akira's ultimate resolution to seek out everything he's always wanted to do is that little bit of hope that makes it work. This isn't the morbid promise of an isekai afterlife but rather a story about experiencing the joys of life no matter the circumstances. If the anime can keep up even a fraction of this energy and style, it'll be an easy keeper for the season.

In my preview guide entry for My Unique Skill Makes Me OP even at Level 1 yesterday, I talked a bit about how Japanese company life is often so exploitative and soul-crushing that the idea that doing constant hard, manual labor in a fantasy world is not only seen as the better option but as a literal escapist fantasy. Zom 100's premise takes it to an even further extreme—saying that even fighting for your life in a literal zombie apocalypse is a better alternative than working in a “black company.” 22 minutes with this series should give you a pretty realistic picture as to why this isn't as hyperbolic as it seems at first glance.

But beyond setting up the premise, this first episode is a tight character piece introducing us to our hero, Akira. Once a bright-eyed youth graduating from the Japanese equivalent of an Ivy League school, eager to work in an industry he cares about, three years of work at a typical "black company" have turned him into a listless shell of his former self. While we quickly learn to identify with Akira through the unfairness of his situation, there is something much more clever going on here.

Thematically, for most of this episode, we are seeing Akira turn from a human into a zombie—not one that eats brains, mind you, but one that toils endlessly for his company. He doesn't have thoughts or feelings of his own—no big plans or moments of joy. He just works. The thing that made him human has been nearly stomped out—with only the tiniest of sparks remaining. It's only when the zombie apocalypse starts that he comes to life.

In a world of survival, he doesn't need to go to work. He doesn't have to worry about making money or the feelings of his coworkers. He can do all the things he always wanted to do. He can quit his job (and throw his zombified boss off a balcony) and confess his feelings to his longtime crush. And while things may not turn out as he had dreamed, he is finally able to start living. Or to put it simply, as the vast majority of people go from human to zombie, he goes from zombie to human.

These are punctuated by fantastic animation. The colors become more muted over his time at the company—then become so vibrant when the apocalypse starts that blood appears as various fluorescent colors in his eyes. Then there is the excellent directing, which adds an entire level of "show don't tell" through visual metaphor and clever scene transitions.

As far as premieres go, this is easily the best of the season so far. And while I'm not sure the show can keep up this pace indefinitely, I'm sure I'll be watching it next week—and the eleven weeks to follow.