Tendou Akira is broken. Working at home while easting and watching a zombie movie, the camera pulls back when he finally passes out, and his apartment is a abject disaster. It wasn’t always like this. When Akira was a bright-eyed bushy-tailed new hire at a production company, he was ready to take a bite out of the world…and immediately fell for Saori from Accounting.
When he joins his co-workers for drinks after work, Akira is on top of the world, and Saori even gives him a smile when their eyes meet among the others. But then everyone gets up at the same time…to head back to work. His first day is an all-nighter. Then another all-nighter. There is simply too much work, but he wouldn’t dream of complaining on his first day.
When he’s finally able to go home two days later, all he can do is collapse into his bed, utterly spent. But the next morning he decides to stop complaining, dust himself off, and get back to work. His chipper, never-say-die attitude transfers to his voiceover as he describes what a great company he works for, which contrasts with the awful things taking place in reality—including the CEO assaulting Saori without consent.
Ultimately, there is no way to sugarcoat what is going on at this exploitative company, and Akira loses both the will and energy to do so. Ground down into dust, he apologizes to mailboxes and is shambling around like, well, a zombie. One morning starts with Akira getting a letter stating he forgot to pay his bike parking fee. But when he goes to the office to sort it out, a man is eating a woman—both of whom have been turned into zombies.
Akira runs out of his building to find a full-on Zombie Apocalypse taking place in Tokyo, and all he can think about is how he’s going to be late for work…until he realizes there isn’t going to be work today, or tomorrow, or ever. The moment he realizes this is exceedingly cathartic and joyful, and the show’s house style turns his monochrome world into one of vivid color: blue skies, green trees…and red blood.
While an apocalypse for nearly everyone else, Akira feels like he’s been given a new lease on life (especially since his job was giving him suicidal thoughts), and he fully intends to do as much as he can with the time he now has at his disposal. The first thing he wants to do is properly confess his feelings for Saori, which he’s harbored since they first met.
Only when he arrives at her apartment, the CEO is there. Despite the CEO turning into a Bloater-like super zombie before his eyes, Akira calmly and professionally declares his resignation, before using his rugby background to shove his murderous boss off the balcony.
But if the boss is a zombie, it stands to reason Saori is too. And sure enough, she is. But in the few seconds he has before she rushes him with intent to eat his brains, he declares his love for her, and at least for a moment, in his head, he gets one last smile from Saori, before he has to run for his life. In both the resignation and confession scenes, Akira is essentially the straight man while the CEO and Saori are the comic in these deliciously dark double acts.
Akira stops by a konbini to buy a notebook and writes “100 Things I Want to Do Before I Turn into a Zombie”, which gives us the show’s playful title and also leads to the baller ED theme (which may end up being the OP theme in future episodes). With the affairs of his “old” life all squared away, he has truly turned a new page, and there’s nothing but adventure and excitement up ahead!
That is, unless he’s being overly optimistic to the point of delusion, like he was during his earlier tenure with the exploitative company—the kind on which the show levels ruthless, withering, in-your-face criticism. The contrast between Akira’s chipper-ness and the horrible zombie apocalypse milieu makes for a book full of blank checks the studio, Bug Films, seems fully capable of cashing.
I’m looking forward to seeing what he has in mind for his Zombie Bucket List, and who he’ll meet who still has a good head attached to their shoulders. Zom 100 also happens to be one of the most lushly animated and stylish cinematic series since Chainsaw Man, with a premise nearly as bodacious as Akiba Maid War. Mostly it’s just a bloody crowd-pleasing bucket of fun.
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