Quick question: did you ever hear any of your friends just saying point blank “Man, I miss the lockdown period/COVID”? Afterwards they usually proceed to explain that obviously they don’t mean the full two years, but just a month or two – working from home, unwinding , getting some rest in. Just imagine how distorted our perception of reality is when spending time in lockdown becomes preferable to monotonously going day in day out to a soul-sucking job within twisted society. This is what we have arrived at, searching for an escape, for solace and refuge in a mandatory detachment from everyone and everything. Anyway, enough about that, we are here to discuss anime (there is a point to what I’m saying – don’t worry).
It is strange to think that in such a saturated market, where there is less and less originality, from time to time it is still possible to find something new; it is even more outstanding if this novelty happens in such an explored genre such as the zombie one. Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead managed to do exactly that by placing the zombies as mere set pieces, rather than the main focus. The plot is cantered around a white collar worker and it depicts a story that, for many people, is discomfortingly too familiar. The protagonist gets sucked in by a corporation that is excessively and unhealthily focused on work; life in the office becomes the only way to live, dedicating yourself body and soul to meet deadlines and overworking yourself to the bone. Overexertion becomes second nature but, at this point, you are so accustomed to it that you don’t even notice – in a certain sense you go on autopilot mode and time continues to pass, relentlessly, until it is too late to do something about it. That is the initial scene of the life of the protagonist that Zom 100 portrays.
So here’s the turning point: a zombie epidemic breaks loose and everything changes for our protagonist. It is however not a change for the worst, quite the contrary: he realizes that he does not need to show up for work the following morning, or the one after that, or ever actually. He feels ecstatic, free from a previous burden that was literary crushing him; unbound by the soul sucking job and society he lived in, the zombie outbreak represents a new start. He does not care for the zombies – they are just present – a minor inconvenience and nothing more.
The first episode especially depicts this shift stunningly. The corporate job and the work environment that was absorbing the protagonist is depicted as a loss of colour; as he loses his will to live and any kind of joy that he previously had, so does the world around him starts to become grey. It is just when he realizes that the zombie epidemic hits that everything instantly regains colour – it is a well-used analogy. Furthermore, the aesthetic employed for the zombies themselves is intriguing as blood is almost never shown as being that dark or bright tinge of red that we would expect but rather multi-coloured with vivacious tonalities.
While it is true that it started to be published in a pre-Covid ‘era’, maybe now more than ever this story has has a resounding impact on all of us. Considering the shifts in society, the principle of “you are easily replaceable”, the anxiety-inducing vast-yet-claustrophobic world we are living in, Zom 100 emphasises the importance of living, of freedom and of taking a breather. It is a breeze of fresh air that wants to alleviate our current condition and possibly even wake us up from what seems to be a nightmarish dystopia.
Going back then to mi initial point: amongst the things we have learned from the COVID pandemic is not just the fact of how easily some jobs can be done from home, but also that there are essential workers that constitute the backbone of modern civilization (and that they are hardly appreciated enough). Many of these professions – based also on the fact that they do not receive the proper recognition and worth – funnel the lives of individuals towards a soul-sucking spiral of day-after-day nihilism; only few manage to actually find a good working place that makes them happy. This has become our society, one that makes people at a certain point reject any form of personal values, almost turning them into either cogs or brain-dead zombies. The protagonist from this simplistic anime symbolizes a sort of rebellion to that. Now, I’m not saying that you should just quit your job and start doing what you want without thinking about the consequences, but I am suggesting that there are always alternatives. Admittedly, those alternatives are not necessarily easy to find, and they might take a lot of effort, but do consider if they are worth it. Regaining the sight of colour in a world that by now starts to appear more and more tainted with shades of grey might be a valid pursuit.