Halloween is the time of year for the macabre. Gore, dismemberment and decaying flesh all fit the motif of the holiday, which makes it the perfect time to revisit zombies in entertainment. The Walking Dead is a good safe choice or maybe the comfort of a George Romero movie may fit the mood a little bit more. Be a rebel and watch Brad Pitt battle the undead in World War Z. All have their merits, but it may be time to add a new staple to the list of beloved list of zombie entertainment that gets dusted off along with the fake tombstones and cobwebs that decorate the lawn.
The anime is called Zombieland Saga and it’s got everything all the great zombie movies and television shows have, but like all great contributors to a well-established genre it has a killer twist. This show uses the undead as something that is empowering and uplifting through the power of music. Japanese pop idols and zombies don’t sound like a good combination on the surface, but it really does work to perfection offering up all the splatter house fun of a good horror movie while leaving the person watching feeling just a little bit better about the world at the end of every episode.
The Walking Dead built a compelling show on people pushed into extraordinary circumstances by a predator that could very well be a parent, child or even the next-door neighbor. With society in shambles due to the spread of an undead plague, bad people had an excuse to force their might makes right mentality on everyone. A world that doesn’t require human decency to survive makes for a bleak yet entertaining premise for a show. Zombieland Saga uses this same formula, but operates in reverse. The zombies aren’t monstrous villains, but the beloved main characters out to capture the hearts and minds of an adoring public predisposed to hate them.
The show is about a high school girl named Sakura Minamoto who has visions of being a pop idol when she walks out the door one morning. That dream dies when her life is unceremoniously put to an end by a wayward delivery truck. She wakes up again to find herself turned into a zombie with a mysterious benefactor named Kotaro Tatsumi pushing her pop idol dreams despite her losing both memory and being undead. Sakura’s mission is to gather up fellow zombie idols from past eras to form an idol group that will help inject life into the flagging rural city of Saga, Japan. There is irony in a group of the undead being asked to come in and save a city being abandoned in favor of the suburbs.
Sakura is the only sentient zombie surrounded by a group of brainless ones that were once stars when they were alive. Being expected to perform under such conditions while keeping their zombie identities a secret is enough pressure to give Zombieland Saga the tension necessary to be interesting. Each new performance and every idol added to the group slowly turns the tide of opinion until suddenly it’s hard to deny that yeah, Franchouchou is a group worth paying a ticket to see a concert for.
The stars of this show are truly the zombie idols. Each one, including Sakura, deals with the reason they died in the first place and what to do with their strange new lease on life. There is the youngster Lily Hoshikawa, the rebel and outspoken team leader Saki Nikaido, the elder states-woman of the group Yugiri, the zombie who never fully regains her humanity Tae Yamada and the two ace singers in Yuki Konno and Ai Mifune. Zombieland Saga doesn’t skimp on any of the idols giving each of them their moment and time to endear themselves to the audience with the appropriate amount of head rolling and dismemberment of course.
Music is the backbone of this anime and one of the best parts about it is the way it integrates music and the culture surrounding it into the show. Every genre comes into play with everything from death metal to rap and of course idol music getting featured. Then there is the work of promoting an idol group. Things like shooting commercials, meet-and-greets with fans and creative tensions within the group made more difficult by being zombies.
Zombieland Saga is a story about zombies and it delivers everything that the genre demands only — cute. Decaying flesh and zombie attacks among the idols are all in play in this anime. The mascot is a frankenstein of a dog named Romero with mismatched body parts and vampire teeth. Romero represents the cutsie scary aesthetic this anime works hard to achieve, somehow toeing the line between being grotesque and lovable.
Pop idols are supposed to be the cutesy kind of pretty and Zombieland Saga doesn’t abandon that aesthetic completely. Franchouchou still wears the cute costumes and manages to look normal in front of audiences with copious amounts of makeup, but it also manages to embrace all the interesting parts of being a zombie. Characters regularly lose limbs and get hit be speeding vehicles often to comedic effect. Even the rabid brainless nature of zombies becomes a major part of the show. All the idols start out as brainless zombies, but Tae in particular steals every scene she is on as the only one who never quite regains her humanity. She perpetually speaks in grunts and growls constantly trying to bite her fellow idols. Somehow, someway she shambles through all of the dance sequences and her feral nature ends up making her one of the shows more interesting characters.
This is horror-comedy, but not in the way it comes up in movies like Scream or Happy Death Day. Zombieland Saga doesn’t deal with death directly, instead using it as a condition to be overcome on the path to fulfilling dreams. Lightning strikes, stage collapses and other assorted events that would otherwise end a concert with a horrific news article attached to it becomes the path Franchouchou takes to mega stardom.
Zombieland Saga isn’t the typical zombie affair, but that does not mean it isn’t worthy of a spot on the Halloween binge list. Give it a shot, it may make the list of undead favorites this season.
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