Zombie Land Saga E1: “Good Morning SAGA”

This review was commissioned by calagon1.

Zombie Land Saga is another one that I've heard the name of, but not much more. It came out as a 1 cour anime in 2018, and was released simultaneously with a tie-in manga that ended up continuing long after the show was finished. The studio behind it, MAPPA, is a relative newcomer to the industry, having been launched in 2011. They've mostly made video game tie-in cartoons so far, but their short list of original properties includes 2016's Yuri On Ice, which I imagine pretty much all of you have already heard of if not seen.

So, pretty eclectic history, in other words. No idea what to expect from this show, except that there will probably be zombies in it. Let's start!

It's a sunny morning in Somewhere, Japan. Birds are singing, flowers are blooming, and an overly perky anime redhead named Sakura is watching some idol singers on YouTube. Sakura informs us that she's a high school sophomore, and sort of an underachiever, but that her life is finally about to kick off for real now.

She just got a letter from some corporation about an "audition," which I'm guessing is for a teen idol singer career of her own from the context. Well, I guess that's where the zombies come in.

Sickeningly cheerful music plays as she runs out into the sun, excitedly babbling to herself. She crosses the street, and is hit by a truck.

I'd make a joke about Truck-kun and her future being full of raccoon slave boys, but the way this scene was done...well, this wasn't an isekai truck crash. The sound of cracking steel and glass and breaking bone. The way her body bends unnaturally where it's been broken. It's a legitimately shocking and almost horrifying moment, and despite the over-the-top anime perk that preceded it the crash feels real in a way that's hard for me to articulate.

Granted, a moment later some silly death metal starts playing and the intro credits appear amid a cheesy/cartoony blood splatter effect, which lightens the tone again. This whole intro has the vibe of someone pulling a prank on you, but then inviting you to laugh along with them and there being no hard feelings. And, sure, I can appreciate that. You got me bro. As far as setting tone and expectations, this is a pretty strong opening.

After the intro credits, Sakura wakes up in what looks like a big spooky mansion or something. Not a hospital or a mortuary. Maybe she actually did get isekai'd after all? Not sure. Her body is working fine, at least, as she gets out of the cot she was laying on and moves around the room without difficulty.

She doesn't look zombie-ish, either.

So, either raccoon slave boys incoming after all, or this is a dream sequence and she's about to wake up as a zombie, or her body was stolen by a necromancer and she already has woken up as a (very lifelike) zombie.

The eerie music dies down, and then the ensuing silence is broken when a gray-skinned zombie in a maid uniform comes crashing through one of the glass doors and tries to grab her. Sakura freaks out and just barely manages to escape. There's some really precise animation of the zombie being impeded by its own jerkiness as it tries to chase her around corners, and of Sakura slipping on its ichor trail and nearly falling as she flees passed it. Combined with the lack of music, it once again feels very real and weighty, but I've been conditioned to not take that too seriously now. Sakura manages to escape the maid zombie, but then finds herself cornered by a group of others.

All girls. All with loud wardrobes and hairdos. Yup, we're in teen idol town after all, Sakura got her wish!

Cue fight music! Sakura collapses back against the wall as they close in around her, but in a desperate panic she grabs a poker leaning against the nearby fireplace and just straight up impales one of them through the head. Damn, you go girl! I foresee a spectacularly violent idol career for you, and not in the pussy-ass Symphogear way. I fully expect you to get up onstage and take an actual chainsaw to actual corpses while metal-screaming about love and friendship. This staggers the zombie on her right for just long enough to let Sakura slip through and flee the room again. And, this time, she manages to make it outside into the rainy night.

The character animation continues to be exceptionally realistic. I don't know if I've ever seen a panicked flight down a winding staircase this convincing before in a cartoon.

It turns out she hasn't been isekai'd, at least. Or, if she has, the world she was sent to looks pretty darned similar to the one she left. She's in Saga Prefecture, which isn't the city she lived in before (based on her reaction to seeing the street signs, at least), but also isn't terribly exotic. As she stands out in the late night rain, panicked and clearly lost, Officer Arucopsu Arbastardso approaches and gleefully announces that he's going to arrest her for being out after curfew, while also being creepy toward the obvious minor. When he gets close enough to see her clearly, though, he panics, pulls his gun on her, screams at her not to come any closer, and flees.

Sakura looks in a nearby reflective surface, and it turns out that the visuals up until now have been unreliable, and largely from her perspective.

Sakura is a zombie after all. Or...well, not a zombie exactly. She's still moving like normal, and has her mind, whereas the others we saw were more Romero-style zeds. Wonder why she came back different from the other girls in our mysterious necromancer friend's idol band?

A gunshot splits the air, opening a bullet hole in her chest. Looks like the cop got ahold of himself and realized that while she might be a zombie, but she's also an innocent bystander and should be dealt with accordingly. She looks down at the wound, and then collapses onto her back on the wet pavement, though seemingly more from shock at the revelation than from the bullet. As the cop creeps closer to see if she's still moving (she is), someone else sneaks up and brains him with a shovel.

Shovel. Makes me think grave robbing. Makes me think the wizard responsible for all this might have followed or sent someone after her when she escaped the house. She gets a brief look at her "rescuer" before losing consciousness.

Why'd she pass out? Maybe just shock. The bullet itself doesn't seem to have done all that much to her.

When she wakes up again, she's back in the mansion. This time, the room she awakens in is cheerfully lit, and only a few seconds after she gets up the shovel guy comes in with a cute stitched-together undead dog in his arms and explains things to her.

She died in that traffic accident ten years ago. I'd normally be skeptical of this guy's claims, but given that the intro scene was dated to summer 2008 and this pilot came out in the summer of 2018, I'd say it tracks. And, apparently she's got a team she needs to do hero stuff with. Those other zombies didn't exactly seem like team players, but maybe she just caught them at a bad time.

Then he grabs her under the chin and turns her face upward in a not at all creepy way, and says that as long as she does everything he says without question there will be no trouble.

...

You want to know what really sucks? The fact that, with the amount of anime I've now seen, I actually have no idea if I'm supposed to think this guy is a villain or not.

A year ago, I wouldn't have thought twice. This guy reanimated her, irresponsibly left her alone with a bunch of more aggressive and mindless zombies when she woke up, and is now demanding total obedience without seeing fit to explain himself while invading her personal space in a clear "villain captures damsel" looking way. But since he has a couple of quirks to his appearance, and because he's an older male in a show with a teen girl main character, I know that it's as likely as not that I'm supposed to look up to and like him anyway, and to see any acts of resistance on her part as childish rebellion that needs quashing.

I've developed an instinctive, reflexive hatred for "Sensei." The instant I see him introduced in another show, I want to punch him in the face and then stop watching. And then find some nice, cramped lockers to stuff otakus in.

Even if this guy isn't Sensei, I hate him just for reminding me of him. Which I guess is a good thing if he actually does turn out to be a bad guy.

...

Anyway, the guy names himself as Kotaro Tatsumi, and says that (either in addition to or as part of saving the city) he's going to make her into an idol. In the moment, all she can think of is that she just noticed he has raw calimari stuffed in his front coat pocket. Heh, okay, that got a smile from me.

Commercial break, after which we see that Sakura has been locked in a prison cell with literal bars along with the other zombie girls. She's sitting there looking traumatized. The other zombies are shambling around and moaning. At least they aren't attacking her anymore, so there's that. Eventually, Tatsumi comes in and tells her good morning. When she miserably looks down and doesn't answer, he gets right up in her face and screams at her to say good morning back. She complies. He then smugly lectures her about how she'll need better manners if she ever wants anyone to respect her. I still can't tell if he's supposed to be a bad guy or not. She timidly asks him how she became a zombie. He asks her if she's ever seen a zombie movie, and when she answers yes he tells her "it's like that." She tries, very nervously, to press him further on the subject, and he gets in her face and screams at her again for daring to ask about what he (presumably) did to her.

I still can't tell if he's supposed to be a bad guy or not. The music being lighthearted and silly here makes me fear the worst, though.

She next, understandably fearfully, asks him how being an idol is supposed to save Saga. And, it turns out that when he said they would save the city, what he meant was that they would save the city's status as a pop culture capital and the parts of its economy that lean on that. So, he used the powers of dread necromancy to launch the Zombie Land Saga project. Okay then. Sakura asks him how she's supposed to be a diva, or anything else really, when she can't even remember who she is or anything about her life. It seems that she has her general knowledge and language intact, but no personal memories. Tatsumi tells her not to worry; she's recalled far more than any of the others so far. They're still at the animalistic shambler level, and Sakura is the first of them to have "awoken," which earns her the more humanizing title of zombie-1. The other girls, apparently, are all famous singers and entertainers from throughout the last 200 years of Japanese history. Most from the late 20th-early 21st century "idol" craze, but a couple are older, and he has one who was a courtesan from the late Edo period. I guess he picked girls who peaked early and died young. And also somehow restored the flesh to most of them, who would have been skeletons when he dug them up. He's very evasive when asked why he decided to choose Sakura to add to the group.

As he explains this, he idly gets one of the others to stop gnawing on Sakura's arm by dangling some raw squid in front of her, which she gulps messily down. Zombies like calimari I guess.

...

God, this just...

This seems like a really obvious and heavyhanded satire of the idol girl thing, with a strong focus on the commodification and dehumanization of the girls, and how they're basically just a cutesy, sexy face over a slimy corporate enterprise run by maniacs and perverts. I really WANT to say that that's what this is. If I were watching this a year ago, I'd have no doubts about it. But, thanks to some the shit I've had to wade through since then, I'm still not sure. This guy hasn't done anything worse than Colonel Fucknuts in Symphogear. He's only slightly less likable than Milady-kun from Garden of Sinners. Etc.

I have no confidence to say anything about scenarios like this one in anime anymore. When it comes to female-centric-anime-written-mostly-for-men, there's just no ceiling on the cringiness, to the point where using it as an effective vehicle for satire is impossible.

...

He finishes by explaining that tonight, he's going to have them put on a performance. Hopefully that'll provide enough sensory stimulation to awaken the other zombies to the same level of awareness as Sakura.

Makes sense. Sakura was laying alone on a bed in a dark, quiet room when she awakened, so logically one can infer that sensory stimulation is what does it.

He takes them to the place, evidently without having even prepared anything. It's a death metal concert, and everyone is very confused to see this clean cut guy leading a bunch of dolled up idol girls out of his creepy van and in the backstage entrance. He's managed to make them all look alive and healthy, using either some really good makeup or more necromancy, but all of them except Sakura are still shambling and moaning and only following him because it's the only way for them to go with Sakura bringing up the rear.

Apparently, this was the only open-mic concert he could find on short notice. Because he had to do it on short notice for some reason. Sakura asks him what the hell he expects them to do, and he tells them that they're the idols, that's their job to figure out. She does stop being terrified long enough to comment on his makeup skills, though.

He claims he did this using some secret makeup techniques he learned during his stint as a backstage guy in Hollywood, but I suspect he's lying and he actually used some occult bullshit. Regardless, Sakura says that even if the girls look alive, they're not going to act like it. What's to keep them on stage, let alone doing anything close to performing? What's to keep them from getting scared and attacking someone?

Ah, well. Now that he puts it that way, sure, reasonable.

A moment later, the zombies start randomly convulsing. Are they starting to awaken? No, I guess not, Sakura just has to calm them down again while Tatsumi sort of helps I guess. Okay, just random convulsions.

Their time comes up, and they go out on stage. The metalheads thing this is some kind of joke, and get mad and loud pretty fast as Sakura - for want of anything else to do -starts making a nervous speech about how happy she is to be here. The other girls just wander around the stage gibbering and playing with random objects. One metalhead yells at Sakura a little too aggressively, and provokes a zombie into leaping off the stage at him, forcing Sakura to run down and pull her off of him before she can tear his throat out.

However, the metalheads take this as a sign that these girls are "actually kinda brutal," and decide to give them a chance. Tatsumi puts on some random death metal instrumental music, and the startled zombies all start screaming horribly, with a few of them by sheer coincidence happening to hold microphones near-ish to their mouths while they do it. Then they start convulsing again, and the metalheads are impressed by their ability to headbang so hard that it looks like their necks are broken. Eventualy, Sakura just starts doing it herself and rolls with it.

As the performance goes on, Tatsumi watching with a victorious smile, something odd happens to Sakura. When she does the "headbanging" thing, the flashing lights on the ceiling seem to...hypnotize...her? Did zombification give her epilepsy or something?

Ah, no, I see. It's jogging her memory. The lights, stage, and costumes are reminding her of a glimpse of her old life. Either a concert she attended, or just the one she saw on YouTube the day she died. She goes wobblier than even the other zombies, and falls off the stage. Naturally, the metalheads take this for another attempt at moshing, and just bear her aloft.

Cut to the next day. Sakura is sitting on the balcony of the mansion she and the others are imprisoned in, staring into the sky and trying to remember anything else of who she used to be.

She hears an alarming noise from inside, and runs in to see the other girls looking around in terror and confusion, asking where they are and what's going on. Looks like either the concert did awaken them somehow, or else they were all just due to activate around now anyway and Sakura just happened to be first. End episode.


I kind of already came to my conclusion halfway through the review: I don't know what to think. Not because I'm confused, but because I've seen shows like this one communicate the exact opposite of what they're trying to once too often.

It's definitely a parody of musical subcultures in general, what with the death metal being indistinguishable from random screaming and moaning as far as the fans could tell. But, is the premise of the creepy necromancer enslaving these girls supposed to be a similar commentary on the idol girl side of Japan's music industry, or is this just supposed to be a "quirky" anime family with random dark humor thrown into it and an unironic love letter to that industry? Is Tatsumi supposed to be an idiot who lucked into a successful performance despite his irresponsibility, or is this one of those cases where Sensei is always right by virtue of his age and penis even when it isn't physically possible for him to be in the right?

So, yeah. Maybe this is a fun show. Maybe it isn't. I can't tell.