Cute girls doing cute things at school… during the zombie apocalypse! It’s easy to have reservations about this show based on that premise, I think for fairly obvious reasons. This is what Gakkou Gurashi! (aka School-Live!) seemed to be billing itself as prior to airing, and while it drew a lot of attention it was not exactly positive. The moe schoolgirl s’life thing has had its moment in the sun, zombies are seriously passé, and the last time high school + zombies was attempted in anime we ended up with Highschool of the Dead and the less said about that the better.
But as they say, you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Gakkou Gurashi! proved to be a remarkable series, intensely dramatic, horrifying and psychological. ‘Cute girls doing cute things’ was really only a surface impression, and the reality is far more complex than that.
Note: this review WILL be mentioning some early spoilers. It’s impossible to discuss certain important parts of the series without mentioning those early events, but knowing of those early events ahead of time could seriously ruin your enjoyment of them. So consider this a warning! If you just want to know my general impressions: Gakkou Gurashi! is excellent, frequently emotionally trying, and you should watch it.
So how is this not a cute-girls-doing-cute-things show? Survival isn’t a ‘cute thing’. Above all else, the characters are simply trying to survive. They’re stuck in the upper floors of their school with the lower floors barricaded off in a ramshackle fashion. They’re fortunate – the school is equipped with solar panelling, so they have power, a largescale rain collector and water purifier, so they have clean water, and a roof garden allowing them to have at least some sort of replenishing food supply. And they are keenly aware of just how fortunate they are, how they couldn’t have survived this long were it not for the school’s facilities, and how much they depend on them. It’s not like they could easily move on to somewhere else – the school’s surrounded and infested by their former classmates, and they’re just a group of young girls (and their teacher). The fact they made it through the initial panic and made it this far was simply a case of them being in the right place at the right time. And they are constantly reminded of those less fortunate.
Food is still a problem, though. They may have the roof garden, but that can’t feed all of them every day. So they often have to venture to the bottom floor and raid whatever supplies the school has left; and when that runs out, further afield. At those times they’re forced to confront their old friends in a terrified life-or-death struggle to stay alive for just a few more weeks. A lot of the horror in Gakkou Gurashi! comes from these two simple sides to their survival. Extended periods of quietness and keeping themselves alive and sane with the constant, omnipresent background horror punctuated by brief moments of panic and fear. There’s a creeping sense of dread, a feeling that they’re on borrowed time, and they have to put themselves through major emotional distress just to extend it even a little bit.
In the end, they’re just normal teenage girls. Their ability to improve their lot extends as far as to what they can learn from books that they scavenge from the school library. They can’t take the fight to the zombies. All they can do is keep themselves alive and hope that help will come, one day. It makes it all a lot more believable this way.
That said, it’s not like the characters are hugely compelling. They’re still pretty in line with what I’d expect out of the premise: Yuuri is the dependable leader who can be intensely intimidating when people are playing up; Kurumi is the spirited action girl who is easily poked fun of; Yuki is the super-childish genki girl; and Miki is the quiet loner who just needs to open up. But even if they’re not the deepest or most complex characters put to screen, the show knows how to use them to deliver some huge emotional punches.
Seeing Yuuri unable to shoulder the responsibility of the leader, Kurumi getting just a bit too careless, Miki pining for her old friend whom she was split up from, it can hurt. The characters are put through the wringer on many occasions, and it can be painful to watch. They’re just a group of teenage girls forced into this awful scenario, and even though they do the best they can, they can’t do it perfectly. And it’s in that small gap that the show finds its tension, its drama and its tragedy.
Yuki, more than any other character, is central to the show’s pathos. Unlike the others, who do what they can to survive the world they find themselves in, Yuki doesn’t. She rejects it. When everything first went to hell, she was so traumatised that she has essentially existed in a constant hallucination since then, seeing the school as perfectly normal with all of her friends still surrounding her. It’s where the namesake of the show comes from – the ‘School Living club’. Needing to find some way of keeping Yuki with the rest of them, doing the same things they’re doing, they invented a school club that lives on campus with a laundry list of convenient responsibilities and flimsy excuses to not go further than their barricades.
There’s a sad acceptance from the rest that leaving her like this is for the best. Not in the long run, or even really in the present, but trying to help her is so beyond their abilities that letting her stay blissfully ignorant in her own world, even though it’s not healthy at all, is the best they can do for her. The disparity between Yuki’s attitudes and their environment, the way the others have to quickly find a way to get her to be quiet so they don’t attract zombies, how they do what they can to keep her delusion up, it all serves to highlight how bad the world’s become. Yuki doesn’t even see some fantastically great reality – she just sees how it used to be.
But this doesn’t get driven home nearly as hard as when the illusion does begin to break, when she can’t reconcile reality with what her mind insists on it being. In those moments, she desperately denies what’s going on, full of fear and pain, and her hallucinations are revealed to be a pitiful coping mechanism. In those moments, we are faced with the true horror of a bizarre and nonsensical disease that turns all of your friends into beasts and destroys all society as Yuki faces that initial trauma all over again.
That is where Gakkou Gurashi!’s true heart-breaking horror lies.
Even though Yuki’s cheerfulness results in some of the darkest moments of Gakkou Gurashi!, it also (somewhat unsurprisingly, in retrospect) stops the story from being entirely grim and depressed. Because she’s oblivious to what’s going on around them, she compels everyone to do fun club activities and the like. They’re of course limited to where they can do them, but they still find ways to enjoy themselves.
It sounds like this would be at odds with the horror premise, but it adds a lot. After all, entertainment is still a key part of survival, if only to maintain your sanity and optimism. And it ties back in with them being normal schoolkids – it’s only natural that they’d want to experience at least some semblance of a normal school life. Yuki helps to let them not just survive, but live. Despite the hopelessness that pervades, Gakkou Gurashi! isn’t nihilistic, and that’s very important.
On a more meta level, it still helps build the atmosphere. After all, without those moments of happiness and fun the horror wouldn’t have the same impact; you can’t have shadows without light.
That said, the show can go too far with it. There’s an episode where they scavenge a mall for supplies; while there, they try on swimsuits in an upbeat montage. A mall that still had lots of zombies in it, as we see later. It’s so thoroughly inappropriate for where they were that it forcefully ejected me out of my immersion – it’s one thing to joke around a bit to keep their moods up, but to do something that could realistically get themselves killed? Or what about how the show felt a swimsuit episode where nothing of major significance happens should take place immediately after an episode that introduced a huge mystery? Both of these were really disappointing, because in both cases they really hurt what had been built up immediately prior.
As bad as those scenes are, it comes from poor timing than being out of place within the context of the entire show. It still ties in with theme of not just surviving, but living. The club activities, the shopping trip, keeping a dog despite being a drain on their resources, letting Yuki stay in her head despite being a liability, a strictly survival-oriented mindset wouldn’t allow for any of that, but doing all that lets them say that they lived. Miki’s attachment to Kei is based on this – and so are the attachments everyone else has – and when this theme is truly explored with those attachments the emotional impact it can have is immense.
Gakkou Gurashi! was a surprise from start to finish. I went in expecting something not great, maybe getting a few laughs at how goofy the premise would make things at most, but the first episode left me stunned. It hit hard. Yuki had spent the episode being annoyingly hyper and childish in the most anime way, but the reveal of her mental state left me reeling in horror and shock. From there it just kept going, piling on the palpable fear while we watched the characters struggle. I couldn’t believe it, and I was expecting the ball to drop for many weeks before I finally accepted that Gakkou Gurashi! was actually good. And then it went even further, becoming something I can honestly say is excellent. Hell, episode 11 was so difficult to watch, so intense and brutal on my emotions, that that night it crept into my dreams. It lingered in my psyche. That never happens.
It nailed the high-school zombie premise – of a handful of teenagers quietly surviving all by themselves – perfectly. It also succeeded in adding a compelling psychological horror too. And it managed this without ever giving over to being relentlessly miserable, keeping up a fun and optimistic streak that made it all the more enjoyable to watch. Sure, it’s still pretty damn anime, but Gakkou Gurashi! is a remarkable work, far more accomplished than the premise would have you think.
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