Zombie Land Saga E2: “I <3 Hip Hop Saga”

After a very, very long absence, Zombieland Saga is back! We return to protagonist Sakura and a gaggle of other musically inclined dead teenagers, who have been reanimated and enslaved by a mad necromancer who wants them to become an idol group. At the end of the pilot, in the wake of their first performance, all but one of the other zombie girls had managed to recover their memories and personalities. Making them more like wight girls, or lich girls, or whatever. One of them is still a zombie though.

Although, when the bossman starts this episode off by lining them all up in a cell with prison bars and screaming at and invading their personal spaces for not greeting him, it makes one wonder if the last one is only pretending to still be in zombiemode to avoid having to deal with him.

Granted, there are no bars between him and them, and I don't see any restraints, so if they acted together the bunch of them could probably overpower him at this point. They probably won't, given the premise of the show, but I'm really not sure why they won't.

He tries to get them all excited to save the idol industry, and gets furious at them when none of them care. Girls, please, kill this prick.

Cue intro. It's pretty much exactly what you'd expect for this show. Which isn't inherently bad, but I was hoping it would do something to surprise me, and it mostly didn't. Just different visual representations of how the juxtaposition of "cutesy idol girls" and "zombies" is supposed to be funny, with each repetition making it less so. There is one bit where we switch gears entirely and suddenly the girls are fighting a giant monster or something, and that was surprising enough to get my interest and make me curious, but it's just a few seconds out of a too-long, too-samey OP. As anime intros go, this is on the weak side.

Return to the story, with one of the newly awakened girls - a surly blonde by the name of Saki - asking dickface to explain how they came to be alive again after their deaths. He, with his usual respectfulness and courtesy, freaks out at her for being so stupid she can't even recognize a zombie while being one.

Unlike Sakura, Saki at least slaps his hand away when he invades her personal space. Saki, you're obviously going to be the one who has to Furiosa this shit and lead the others to freedom across the wasteland. Dickface then further explains that they "became zombies" (in specifically passive tense) which puts them all in a difficult position. Zombies have no place in human society, and so they'd best accept his generous offer to help them find one without question. He also shows them a clipshow of various zombie horror movies to scare them into thinking that they'll be destroyed on sight if anyone finds out what they are, so no trying to approach anyone else for help either.

Oh my god just eat his brain already.

There's an extremely long and unfunny scene of him arguing with the girls over why he wants them to be idols, why they should want to be idols, how he plans to save the Saga Prefecture economy with one idol band, and why they should care. There's some back and forth. Some tired gags. Visually, it's INCREDIBLY boring, literally just all the girls sitting in their chairs and talking at him while he stands facing them and talks back in elementary shot-countershot format. Hardly any physical comedy until one mildly amusing shot of him using Wikipedia at the end.

Then, we jump from him failing to explain to them why they should care about this or cooperate with him, to them cooperating with him and seeming to care quite a bit. Maybe that's supposed to be the joke itself, but if so the comedic timing is sort of off.

If nothing else, the one girl who's still in mindless zombiemode chewing on the others' legs as they try to practice dance moves is the first effective visual gag in the episode so far.

More than anything else, it's the boring visuals that are dragging this episode down compared to the pilot. The foot-chewing wouldn't have stood out as a highlight in the pilot, but here it just has too little competition.

Anyway, Sakura notices that one of the others - a dark haired girl named Ai who was asking some of the more pointed questions during the first scene - is staring at her a lot during dance practice. She's still wondering about this by nightfall, when the girls are all herded into a shared sleeping(? I'm not sure if they have to sleep or not, but it kind of looks like that's what they're meant to do here) room. There, Sakura is snapped out of her anxious wondering by an extremely aggressive Saki.

Sakura hadn't been doing anything that seemed like screwing with Saki, or planning to screw with Saki, or even interacting with Saki at all, but I guess it was still nice of Saki to be proactive in disclosing this information. It's only polite.

Or...wait. She then starts demanding to know who Sakura is and what school she went to before her death, and gets frustrated when she says she can't remember her past life very well. Some kind of personal grudge that Saki remembers and Sakura doesn't, then? Or at least, a grudge against someone who looks like Sakura, that could also be.

Saki also asks Sakura why she seems to actually care about Dickface's idol plan. Yeah, that's a good question. I continue to like Saki the most out of the cast so far.

Fortunately, after Sakura recoils in fear and does her best to babble out appeasements, Saki relents and admits that she's just lashing out due to the shock and trauma.

Okay, that was funny. Also, Saki continues to be the best. I hope she finds her old Tamagotchi and chokes Dickface with it.

As Saki relents, Sakura sees that Ai - who had been watching her from the corner - appears to have vanished from the room. She starts looking for her. Cut to Ai trying to sneak out of the house, only to be stopped at the door by Dickface's zombie dog.

Said dog is very small and nonthreatening, but Ai seems to have a phobia of dogs that causes her to envision it as much larger and angrier. Okay, good. We had a bad start with this episode, but the visual gags are now back in force and up to the pilot's standard.

Ai manages to slip out a back window on the opposite side of the big spooky manor, out of sight of the fearsome tomb-hound, and makes her way to the fence surrounding Dickface's property. Before she can start climbing though, she comes face to face with another girl, Junko, who had the same escape plan, and the two's startled shrieks bring Sakura over. Fortunately, Dickface seems to be deeply asleep. When she reaches them, Sakura asks an extremely dumb question.

Sakura implores them not to do it, telling them that it really is too dangerous for them outside. The other two tell her that they intend to risk it anyway, even after Sakura shows them the bullet hole she still has from that cop in the pilot. When Ai goes ahead and climbs the fence, Sakura grabs her leg and tries to forcibly pull her back.

This seems a little too extreme of a reaction. Maybe if Sakura actually knew this girl or something, this could make sense. Even then I'm not sure.

Regardless, she pulls too tight, and Ai's arms come off. As do her eyeballs when she hits the ground.

Totally saw that coming, but still cute. And seemingly easy to fix, since from there we cut ahead straight to them having already put Ai back together, jumped the fence, and made it on foot to the nearest train station, with Sakura following and begging the other two to stop and reconsider. Eventually, they start to suspect that Sakura might have other motives than their own safety for doing this.

She admits that when they went onstage for the metalheads back in the pilot - an incident that Sakura alone remembers, due to the others having still been in zombiemode at the time - she felt a sense of exultation that she really does want to relive. It's something that she feels like she's experienced before, though her memories of her human life are too indistinct for her to be sure. I guess she's remembering something about her idol fandom, or maybe a high school performance she gave or something.

The other two look like they're about to tell her that that's good for her, she can head back and be a slave if she wants, but then a car pulls up in front of the station entrance and three...individuals...dance out.

"Rappers," the girls gasp in fear. Apparently, roving gangs of free style rappers are a known hazard in this version of Japan.

The girls try to distance themselves, but the rappers pursue them, freestyling insincere-sounding invitations for the clearly much younger girls to accompany them to a karaoke bar or something. The terrified girls manage to lead the rapacious rappers into the flashlight of a patrolling police officer, who starts rapping right back at them with perfect rhythm as he asks them what the hell they're doing prowling around at this hour and accuses them of being out looking for women to harass again. Sakura recognizes the cop as the same one who shot her a few nights ago, but she isn't able to warn Ai before the latter runs out into the light to tell him what happened.

The rappers scream in fright. The cop screams in fright and wildly fires his pistol. The girls scream in fright at the gunshots. The rappers grab the cop and cling to his body like children begging their mommy to protect them from the monster under the bed.

Even wilder gunshots as he tries to shoot the girls with three rappers hanging off of him. The girls flee the station.

...okay fine. You win, show. I was just kinda barely staying interested until now, but after that scene I'm sold.

As the girls escape in the chaos, Dickface watches surreptitiously from the shadows. I don't know if the implication is that he somehow set this situation up to deter their escape, or if he'd just been pursuing the girls on his own and caught up in time to see them get second thoughts for unrelated reasons. Anyway, by the next morning they seem to have returned to the manor of their own volition. Ai and Junko are still traumatized by the experience of being shot at, just as Sakura was last ep. Sakura is just attacking her dance practice with renewed vigor. Meanwhile, Saki seems to be giving Sakura the stink-eye again (no pun intended). She eventually catches her alone on the balcony, and gets randomly aggressive again.

"Do you want to die?" seems to just be Saki's version of "hello." She always opens conversations with it, and it never has anything to do with what she says next. In this case, she wants to know how Sakura feels about overthrowing their master and trying to start a zombie apocalypse with themselves as the new warlords of earth. When Sakura doesn't seem interested, she just stomps away again. Okay.

Cut to some time later, with them putting on their makeup to look alive and being driven to their second smalltime performance. This time, they're actually doing an idol-ish thing, if for an older crowd of fans. Well, them and a couple of metalheads from last time who tracked them here expecting a repeat of their first performance.

Their name has been changed from "Death Musume" to "Greenface." When introducing themselves to the audience though, Sakura mixes it up (due to Dickface having only changed their name in the last few minutes) and refers to their band as "Green Musume." Okay, sure. The one girl who hasn't snapped out of zombiemode yet is still just shambling around the stage and moaning while the others try to restrain her (mostly out of fear at what might happen if they're revealed). Maybe the metalheads will still like her at least.

Sakura tries to explain that GreenDeath MusumeFace is an idol group trying to revitalize the prefecture, making a few cracks about their moves and sounds being a little green but still heartfelt in the process. The one still zombiemode girl sees an old man in the audience eating calamari, and breaks free of the others to lunge off the stage to get it. Right, zombies in this show love squid for whatever reason. She trips while lurching off the stage though, causing her head to detach and go flying into the audience, where it purposefully bounces itself up to the fried cephalopod and starts snapping at it.

At the very least, the old man is too senile to realize that there's anything wrong with this, and happily shares his lunch with the young lady.

Sakura frantically dashes around trying to stuff the head back onto the torso and assure everyone that this is just a stage prop. She tries to get Saki to stop her, but she's pretty halfhearted in it, finally causing Sakura to blow up at her and ask if she even cares about hiding the fact that they're zombies. Her berating goes on for an awfully long time, and takes on a sort of rhythmic quality.

Ah, I see. The Lestat Technique.

Realizing what Sakura is going for, Dickface pulls a microphone backstage and starts beatboxing into it. Sakura falls into a similar rhyme and cadence as the molestation rappers from the train station, scolding Saki for being overly pessimistic and not even trying to pull themselves up from their horrid undead origins back into the sunlight. Saki takes this serious enough to start rapping back her retorts. Sakura rebuts them, and then spreads it out to interact with the rest of the band members as well, while one girl accompanies on shamisen (whose sound is hilariously dissonant with the beatboxing and rap, even moreso because she's actually following perfectly) and zombiemode keeps thrashing her headless body and moaning randomly.

Just like last time, Sakura proves to be very quick-thinking and adaptable when it comes to playing to a crowd. She quickly figures out how to turn the zombies yearning for a new life into a metaphor for society's disregard for the elderly and...also Japan's demographic collapse? Somehow? I'm not sure I follow the logic, but in the moment she delivers it quickly, confidently, and rhythmically enough that it's easy to miss the fact that it's nonsense. Anyway, she finishes it up with an uplifting message about how it's never too late to do something with yourself and retake society's spotlight, and the crowd goes wild.

It was a small, local performance for a niche audience, but it was successful enough. And those two metalheads might still encourage more of their friends to come back next time. They're particularly impressed by how realistic the headless zombie girl was; that's some serious special effects investment for a brand new teen band.

Afterward, Saki and Sakura have a one-sided reconciliation that ends their one-sided conflict. Sakura isn't sure why any of this, but she's not complaining.

Saki has also decided that she might as well stick with this musically eclectic idol band thing for now. It'll give them money and influence that they can use to overthrow their master and kickstart the zombie apocalypse later.

No idea how Ai and Junko are feeling at this point. I'd like to know. Saki may have talked the talk, but they actually walked the walk until they were literally forced back on seeming threat of destruction. I feel like they deserve a lot more of the narrative focus.

Anyway, that's the end.


Like I said, the random rapper encounter sold me.

I still feel like Dickface - whatever his name is, I literally cannot remember, and I don't consider it worth the effort to look up - is either too hateable or not opposed by the girls enough, depending on where the story goes. I guess the most satisfying route for me would be for the girls to become successful enough that they can threaten him rather than just the reverse, at which point he stops being a taskmaster and starts being their put-upon buttmonkey agent. I don't have much confidence in that though; as I said last time, I've seen enough anime at this point that I know to subtract a letter grade and downshift my expectations two gears the instant that "sensei" appears in a pilot.

In this case though, the humor is of sufficient quality to make up for it. The weakest parts of the show are when it's not being funny or flashy-looking; the first half of this episode suffered from that, while the second half delivered in force. I'm also starting to warm up to Sakura as a character. While she IS the spineless toast-in-her-mouth girl a lot of the time, the extent of her creativity and quick thinking skills makes her engaging despite this. I'm not really sure how to assess the other characters yet, because their interactions so far have mostly come down to a conflict of interests that...well, here it comes back to Dickface. Should I be rooting for them to defeat him, or am I not supposed to be thinking of the story in those terms at all? If not, then like I said in the last paragraph I feel like he should be just slightly less hateworthy.

I'm also tickled by the emerging pattern of each episode playing with a different musical genre. We had the death metal last time, and now the free style rap. In both episodes, the musical crossover setpieces were the comedic and artistic heights of the show. I feel like someone with a better knowledge of musical history might be getting more out of this; I have a sense that there are a lot of related gags going over my head.

On that topic, while I can pretty confidently say that I *do* like this show now, I'm not sure how well it lends itself to my type of review and analysis. If it's mostly just a gag show with a musical motif, all I can really talk about is how funny any given episode is relative to the others and point out the scant bits of musical satire/commentary/in-jokes that my limited knowledge enables me to catch. I guess I'll have to see.