SCHOOL-LIVE!: MY REVIEW
Okay, let’s address the elephant in the room first: if any of you reading this care the slightest bit about spoilers, stop reading right now.
If you’re still with me, I’m taking that as a tacit acknowledgement that you’ve seen School-Live!/Gakkou Gurashi and know what it’s really about…
Because this show is NOT what it looks like at first.
It’s completely deceitful about its true nature, in fact. Everything from the show’s character design, to its marketing, to the timeslot, to its opening theme is part of the deception… think of what suckered you into watching Madoka Magica, and amplify that by a factor of about a dozen. Madoka at least had the courtesy to hint strongly from the start that things were way more ominous than they first appeared to be.
School-Live! doesn’t do that. School-Live! outright lies to its audience, to draw them in and deliver the horrible, devastating, fuck-mothering bombshell of a plot twist in the final minute-plus of its first episode.
You could argue that it’s cruel. But if it is, it’s also damned effective, and I love the show for it.
I’m speaking, of course, of the zombies.
What initially appears to be just another cute, moe-fied schoolgirl slice-of-life comedy is turned on its head when the audience realizes that main character Yuki Takeya, member of a club that loves their school so much that they live there, is in a state of PTSD-induced denial, and that the happy, idyllic school life she enjoys every day is just a figment of her imagination. In reality, a zombie apocalypse has overtaken their entire city… The other students and teachers are long dead or infected, and Yuki, her friends Kurumi, Miki, and Yuuri, and her dog Taroumaru, are the only confirmed survivors. They’ve barricaded themselves in the ruins of their school, and formed a “School Living Club” as a sad, desperate attempt to hold onto their optimism and what’s left of Yuki’s sanity. Almost everything we see in the first episode is part of Yuki’s delusion.
That extends to their teacher, Megumi “Megu-nee” Sakura. Initially seeming to be the fifth survivor, after six episodes of being strangely ignored and talked over by the other girls and inexplicably appearing and disappearing from shots when the camera isn’t looking, Megu-nee is revealed to have died several months ago, offering herself as bait so that her students would survive. Her death was the catalyst for Yuki losing her mind, and the “Megu-nee” we’ve seen for half the series is just another hallucination.
I may be completely failing to do justice to this series. Let me explain: I normally can take or leave zombie stuff. I’ve never gotten caught up in the craze, and outside of a few exceptions like 28 Days Later, I’ve never thought zombies were particularly scary. My main problems are that the zombies get boring quickly, and that the human survivors of zombie movies are generally little better than the zombies themselves. Usually, it’s only a matter of time before they inevitably snap and one person betrays the others. It’s a nihilistic, cynical setup that makes it hard to care when one of those jerks gets bitten and doesn’t tell anyone about it.
School-Live! subverts the “survivors are assholes” cliche by not only making the survivors cute and likable… it spends the vast majority of its first episode letting us get to know them, so that the gut punch at the end hits even harder. The first shot of Yuki talking to herself in a ruined, bloodstained classroom is chilling… the shot of her standing in front of a row of broken windows and commenting that “someone left this one open” before sliding it closed and smiling cheerfully is both terrifying and horrifically sad at the same time. That shot is a beautiful example of “show not tell”: if you’ve been paying attention, you know instantly that this silly, cheerful girl is not well, and what you’ve seen thus far has been an elaborate fantasy. There’s no need to have a narrator barge in and tell us “Yuki is insane”, and no need for more elaboration until it’s necessary for the story.
I almost think that the first episode would work by itself as a stand-alone thing… giving us that twist and leaving us wondering would be incredibly sadistic, yes, but as a writer myself, I find the idea of doing such a thing has a certain appeal. What’s admirable is that the show keeps going even after that, and piles on more twists as it goes along. What’s more, it doesn’t entirely abandon the cutesy art style and moe facade, so that you never expect when the plot’s going to turn dark. When it does, the cognitive dissonance hits hard and you can almost feel the mood whiplash as a physical thing, and that’s exactly what it’s meant to do.
It all has the effect of making the zombie scenes immeasurably scarier than they would be otherwise. It helps that the series wisely keeps the zombies shrouded in shadows and strange fog, or obscured by blurry, violent swings of the camera, with their faces darkened and indistinct and only their eyes visible as eerie, glowing white lights. This is a show where the Japanese censorship laws concerning violence and gore work in its favor: never getting a clear shot of what the zombies’ faces look like or what they’re doing to their victims makes them ten times as frightening as showing the viewer what’s going on. They could show more, of course, but that would desensitize the viewer to the horror over time. By showing an admirable level of restraint, the show keeps the zombies from ever growing boring.
And this show is a lot of things, but “boring” is not one of them. I was told there was a twist in advance of watching the first episode, I was watching out for it, and it still floored me… I knew from the second I saw that bloody classroom that this was going to be a series to remember. School-Live! plays the viewer like a fiddle, making them paranoid even during the cute, funny scenes by reminding them that this whole charade could come crashing down at any moment.
And boy howdy, does it crash down. After an episode of fanservicey hijinks in the school’s water tank, we get some of the most emotionally grueling 22 minutes I’ve seen in years, as the situation goes from bad to fucking dire. Here, again, School-Live! plays the audience: anyone who looked into the manga would notice that the dog, Taroumaru, has a significantly expanded role in the anime. In the manga, he was a one-shot character: a puppy that Yuki found wandering around that had already been bitten, and was abandoned by necessity after he turned. Sad, yes, but not as sad as it could be, as the reader didn’t have time to get attached.
In the anime, Taroumaru is a character in his own right, present from the beginning, providing comic relief from the bleakness of the girls’ situation. For nine episodes, we see him romping around with the girls, protecting them from danger, and we’re fooled into thinking that he’s safe. Surely, surely the series wouldn’t be so cruel as to let something happen to him after that much time, right?
Wroooooong. In the end of episode 9, Taroumaru slips from his collar and wanders down to the school’s basement, where he catches sight of the zombie that used to be Megu-nee. In the next episode, after the girls wonder where he’s gone, he’s very obviously missing from the title sequence, which changes to reflect the story as the series goes on. I let out an audible “Oh, shit” when it got to the part of the opening where he normally catches the little cartoon bone as it bounces off Miki… and he wasn’t there.
The next ten minutes are excruciating. I actually felt physically ill as the show drew out the suspense until it was ready to snap… the scene of Kurumi going down the basement stairs alone in near-silence, following those little paw prints, gets my vote as one of the scariest scenes of any anime in recent memory. It teases you, daring you to hope that things aren’t as they seem, that Taroumaru somehow got away… and then you hear him growl at Kurumi, and see his teeth baring…
It gets worse from there. Kurumi learns that it was Megu-nee who bit Taroumaru, and swings her shovel to put the poor creature out of her misery… and freezes. There’s an entirely too detailed shot of Megu-nee’s rotting mouth opening, and the screen cuts to the eyecatch as we hear the bite.
From there, everything goes to hell. The zombies swarm the school en masse, trying to get out of the rain. Kurumi’s infection spreads rapidly. Yuuri starts to break down from stress, remembering that she promised Kurumi that if she ever got infected, “don’t hesitate for a second”. Miki dissolves into tears when she sees the teeth marks Taroumaru left on Kurumi’s shovel. The zombies storm the barricades the girls have set up. And Yuki stands by the broken windows, in a chilling replay of the end of the first episode, and realizes that she can feel the rain on her face…
Episode 10 gets my vote as the best single anime episode of the year. Not since Madoka have I seen a better example of a series raising the stakes in such a short time. I’ve seen a lot of TV, readers, and it takes a lot to get me emotionally invested… but the number of series that can inspire the level of dread that episode 10 of School-Live! did, I can count on one hand. It’s a superb demonstration that the writers paid attention to Hitchcock’s classic quote: “A bomb explodes under a table… that’s action. A bomb doesn’t explode under a table… that’s suspense.”
There are hundreds of things that I think make School-Live! a work of twisted genius: the lengths the first episode goes to for its deception, the skillful use of subtle horror and unsettling ambiance rather than cheap jump scares, the manipulations of the audience’s emotions, the willingness to make the viewer question what they’re seeing, the fact that despite all the horrible things happening to the cast, that it’s still somewhat idealistic. Maybe that last one is the most remarkable… this is a sad, tragic, frequently horrifying gut-wrencher of an anime, but it’s not hopeless. Yuki may seem like she’s nothing but a burden to the others, an anxiety that she addresses from time to time. But as “Megu-nee” points out, she fulfills an essential function: she gives the others hope. She keeps them going. And as long as there’s that tiny little speck of light at the end of the tunnel, they can keep going, together. It’s the same sort of idealism in the face of crushing despair that made the ending of the Madoka anime so very meaningful to me: You are not alone. As the song goes: “For the wretched of the earth, there is a flame that never dies / Even the darkest night will end, and the sun will rise...” That makes all the difference in the world between School-Live! and the thousands of other zombie shows, movies, books, video games, and what have you. That makes School-Live! my anime series of the year.- BHS
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