(Here we are again, like two months later, with the good stuff! Sorry it took so long, but you know what I'm like. An impending trip I'm going on at the end of the month turned out to be the deadline fire I needed lit under me. Hey, the last minute bullshit worked for Douglas Adams, and he came up with some brilliant results under a burst so close to a deadline. Douglas Adams this is not, but it is my usual on-brand bullshit and I hope you rejoin me here in the metaphorical coffee shop for it!
Oh yeah, spoilers for Zombie Land Saga. There will be spoilers. This particular first section only covers the first two episodes, so if you decide this is the kind of show you want to see, here is a link to episode 1 via Crunchyroll. All the screencaps here are from my DVD copy of the show, which I'm fairly certain is the translation used there. I also hear the dub is very well-done, but I've only seen the show subbed because that's the way I am. Enough preamble. Let's talk about some zombie girls.)
1.1: RIP, Our Early Stumbling Steps Towards A New Unlife!
As is so often the case with these Japanese cartoons I talk about at great length, it all begins with a girl. Let us reflect on the introductions we have had to the girls of the past, those totemic titans of my internal landscape. We met Usagi Tsukino, 14 years old, crybaby and a gourmand with a heart of gold. Madoka Kaname, 14 years old, running through a hazy dreamland and witnessing the end of the world. Miku Kohinata, 15 years old, visiting the lonely grave of the utopic ideal as the rain pours. So, then, are we introduced to a fourth. Sakura Minamoto, 16 years old, a self-professed klutz and scatterbrain who doesn't have everything together. Things will be different this time, though! She's turning over a new leaf, she's going to send off a submission form to become a pop idol, and she will become the girl she wants to be! It's a beautiful sunny morning, birds are flying in the sky, and the bright new future is right ahead for Sakura Minamoto as she runs out of her house with fresh promise and excitement.
Sakura is immediately hit by a truck and killed instantly.
Okay, maybe I spoiled like a twist a few minutes in here, but you're reading a post about Zombie Land Saga. Yeah, it's a show about zombie girls. Oh well. C'est la vie... though I suppose C'est la mort would fit better, wouldn't it? Either way, we hard cut from Sakura laying on the pavement after being launched in the air by a truck to her laying on the floor of a spooky mansion during a rainstorm. What follows... well it almost feels like we've gone back to Night Of The Living Dead. Spooky house, our main female protagonist doesn't know what the fuck is going on, and there are fucking zombies all over the place! One jumps right through the glass of a door and is all "rrrr argh!" and then Sakura locks herself into a room in panic... only to find more spooky zombies! Lucky for her she's able to get away by stabbing one in the head with a poker. Yeah, that'll show 'em! That's what you do to zombies, right, they're monsters in the shape of people you stab in the head to get rid of! Alright now, me, lower that zombie shade a little. Sakura makes her escape into the rainstorm, and lucky for her she finds a friendly police officer! Oh good, thank God, a figure of authority to help our girl out--
Yeah. That's the premise of the show. A zombie idol group is going to "save" a sleepy little district out in the ass-end of Japan. Oh, by the way, you idiots are going on stage tonight. No time like the present to save Saga, after all! One may wonder how the hell zombies can go on stage, and the show's clever answer for this is that Kotaro is a makeup expert and uses advanced Hollywood makeup skills that are super good and let all the girls pass as ordinary living humans. It's more of an explanation than we get for how they were all revived in the first place; in an admittedly good gag, when Sakura asks how she's not dead anymore, Kotaro's answer is "Haven't you seen a zombie movie? Well, there you go." and active yelling when pushed on this further. What, do you need a goddamn flowchart? You're a zombie, you're gonna be an idol, deal with it. Their first venue is an open-stage heavy metal club. Not exactly genre-appropriate for pop idols, but as Kotaro puts it, they don't expect anything from them and that's how they'll blow them away.
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That's Episode 1 for you. How far are we into this segment? (At this point, I am literally checking the word count.) Jesus, 1400 words. Okay. We can bail out of the setup soon and get to more general thematic crunchy bits. Before that, though, I would be remiss not to actually talk about the other six zombie girls who have just awoken to sentience and personality and whatnot. With the understanding that we'll be really delving into their idiosyncrasies later, here's your Zombie Girl Roll Call. We have Ai Mizuno, former idol from the late 2000's. Junko Konno, also a former idol, but from the early 1980's. Saki Nikaido, a delinquent biker pink girl. Lily Hoshikawa, former child actress. Yugiri, Meiji-era Japanese courtesan. Tae Yamada. Just, Tae Yamada. The joke with Tae is that she actually never awakens, and is a stereotypical shambling zombie for the entire show. We've got six entire pins in the board now, so let's save those for later and talk about something interesting as we get into episode 2. In our episode-opening idol meeting, Kotaro lays out the narrative tension at play with the girls being zombies, and what that means for them now:
I could show you more cartoon zombies getting obliterated in this 5-scene highlight reel, but sometimes brevity is better. Everything we've seen in our mini zombie movie marathon would seem to suggest what the 5-scene highlight reel is implying. Keeping their zombie status a secret is a rather extreme version of a double life plot (Well, single life as they're truly undead, but that's semantics and let's not get into that right now) but the phrasing of that first statement brings to mind a curious bit of coincidence. I'm rambling, I'm aware, but this is a funny story. In early February, as I was gearing up to rewatch the show for the note-taking process, I went to visit a friend of mine as I do a few times a year. At his place he had a book called The Zombie Survival Guide, written by the same guy who wrote World War Z. It's your standard how-to guide laying out rules and survival tips for living through a traditional Romero-style zombie epidemic, but as I flipped through the book I landed on a page late into it. All black, with text stating "There is no place for zombies in modern society". A following page laid out much the same added that "Zombies don't dance". If Max Brooks ever saw Zombie Land Saga, he would shit a brick. The fact that I picked up a book with bold statements that the show I was about to rewatch not only echoed but refuted certainly was one of those weird coincidences. Just a weird tangent. Anyway, let's go back to the show.
Boy howdy, how to summarize episode 2 to get to the big climax of it at the end? Let's see here. The girls are booked for another public performance, and now that most of them are sentient things should go smoothly, right? Right? Not especially. Almost immediately there's a lot of tension and disbelief among the newly-awakened girls. Sakura in particular, who felt genuine joy performing the other night and wants to recapture that feeling/flash of memory, runs afoul of Saki for being an idol idealist. Ai and Junko attempt to bail out of the mansion late at night, with Sakura following to try and convince them otherwise because they're all dead and the whole zombie idol thing could work out, trust me! Ai doesn't believe it could, but before they can debate much about it, one of the funniest damn scenes in the show for me happens. I'm gonna make a hyperlink to the official upload of it, but the short version is that a bunch of freestyle rappers try to hit on the girls via freestyle rap, the cop from episode 1 appears, everyone sees the zombie girls, they freak out, and a lot of perfectly timed comedic screaming happens. Listen, it doesn't sound funny when I lay it out like that, but that's the deal with writing about a comedy show. I can't just make it sound funny writing about it after the fact, you gotta see the performance. If the video isn't blocked or whatever, you can see the comedic timing and all that. If not, you're just gonna have to trust me here.
I highlight this because of the whole freestyle rap bit. At the next venue the girls perform at, everything goes absolutely pear-shaped. Tae once again goes full snarling zombie because a guy in the crowd is eating dried squid (zombies love dried squid, we'll put a pin in that for later) and when Sakura tries to keep her from leaping into the crowd, Tae's fucking head pops off and lands on the guy. Sakura is trying to keep a lid on the zombie thing ('cause zombies have no place in modern society, remember) and Saki is absolutely just fucking around with Tae's disembodied head like this is a fun little game. Sakura finally snaps, slapping the head down and yelling about how Saki isn't even trying to hide the fact that they're zombies. It sure is handy that Mr. Chekov sent his rapper guys out for that comedy bit earlier, because what happens next is wild. Up until now Sakura has taken Saki's lumps, but now she's pissed off at this biker girl's cavalier attitude. The two need to hash out some conflict resolution... and the way they clash is via a freestyle rap battle.
I sincerely hope you're able to view that because it's something else, but if you can't I'll do my best to do my job and give you the important notes. Saki argues (through rap, again) that idol stuff is dumb and they're totally dead. Sakura counters that they're not done, and they have a second chance to move forward and move on to something new and brighter... before then rapping at Ai and Junko, the former idol pair, to motivate them to not quit on the idol venture. Sakura is, I stress once more, through the power of freestyle rap, inspiring these girls to not just roll over and give up. To try, try again even though they've been dealt a shit hand and are now walking corpses. We'll put yet another pin in that for now, but damn. Sakura really believes in this thing, and she's passionate about it. This gutsy performance impresses Saki after the show, and heals some of that rift between them. It's here, at the end of episode 2, that I'd like to leave off for now. Zombie Land Saga's 12 episode arc can be split into smaller miniature arcs, and we have just made it past the first one. These seven zombie girls have been inspired and motivated to give this idol shit a shot. What have they got to lose, after all? Of course, the road ahead won't be easy. We'll soon be looking at pitfalls! Perils! Most shockingly of all (but on brand for the kind of thing this blog talks about), of course, is the third spooky P.
Personal conflict. Dun dun DUN DUN DUN DUN!
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