In anime years, that’s like 80
To be completely fair to him, he is essentially back in high school with a bunch of 15-19 year olds and a 17-year-old as his commanding officer. I would become depressed too
In anime years, that’s like 80
To be completely fair to him, he is essentially back in high school with a bunch of 15-19 year olds and a 17-year-old as his commanding officer. I would become depressed too
Miyazaki continues to be correct. The amount of nerds who shat on him because he hated on mass produced slop and AI makes me laugh. They got so mad about it.
Is it good? I hate isekai with a burning passion, but the idea of an isekai that is anti-isekai while managing to be hopeful about it sounds pretty cool
It’s not an isekai at all, it just thematically tied into my jab about the underlying premise of isekais as escapist fantasies. It’s a zombie apocalypse story that starts with a severely burnt out 23 year old office worker whose response to the world ending around him was “holy fuck, this means I don’t have to go to work anymore! I’m free! I’m gonna do everything I wanted to do but couldn’t because I was too busy working!” and then iteratively interrogating that premise to pull out the nihilism and recklessness to arrive at this hopeful and prosocial place that can sort of be summed up as “even in the face of horror and calamity you have to try to enjoy life and help others keep going too”.
The manga is very good, and the anime is gorgeously animated and incredibly stylish (and was done by the same studio that’s doing the Witch Hat Atelier adaptation that’s airing now) and reaches up through the arc that directly pits the cast against narrative foils representing the sort of antisocial nihilism of the protagonists’ starting point without the empathy and self-awareness that steered them away from it.
Later in the manga it literally has one of the protagonists quoting Marx at the culmination of an arc about capitalists using wealth inequality to literally feed people to zombies as entertainment as part of a monstrous gambling show.
The only bad thing about it is that especially as it goes past where the anime ended it can get very
[regional tourism gimmick] 
in some parts and can be a bit too wide-eyed and idealistic about some things (although some of that is an intentional false facade to set up a criticism of it afterwards, much the same way it presented the protagonists initial “I’m so happy the world is ending because I was just that miserable at my job” uncritically and idealistically before interrogating and criticizing it).
That actually sounds right up my alley. One of my biggest gripes with the zombie and apocalypse genre is how much of it ends up being like a survivalist power fantasy of “Finally no rules, now I get to play colonial warrior” and helping others outside your own little family to survive is often portrayed as a naive thing that will get you killed.
It is fantastic and I can’t recommend it enough. Like you say, the zombie genre is often fundamentally misanthropic, and apart from how much schlocky B-movie fun you can have with zombies as a plot device (and it does have a lot of fun with how much weird and silly stuff it can get away with) the stereotypical misanthropy of the genre almost makes it all the more ideal for a story that wants to interrogate and criticize antisocial escapism, power fantasies, hedonism, etc and offer a healthier and more positive position instead.
It’s a meaningful work of art disguised as a schlocky satirical B-movie sort of thing and it’s just great.
The original Night of the living dead being about lynching and dawn of the dead being about commercialisation and consumerism in the US suburbs was quickly replaced by zombies being just… the scenario and not the metaphor. It’s a genre that has missed the forest for the trees. Evem revent zombie films like the 28 years are still about humans surviving with some poetic moments but largely nothing allegorical. I enjoyed them though but yeah