Zombie Loan – Episode 1
13 July 2007
It’s official, this is the one and only time that I will ever take this many screens and actually endeavor to put all of them up. I suppose I got excited, Zombie Loan being the first show I’m blogging about from the summer season. In any case, they were supposed to be in rows of four, by I over estimated how big they should be, so they didn’t all fit.
Zombie Loan was one of the shows I was really looking forward to, along with Baccano! and the second season of Tokyo Majin. From the previews on various blog, it looked promising, full of your usual anime cliches, but quick and fun and suitable for my summer vacation attention span.
The opening, OOKAMI no NODO by The Birthday according to my fellow bloggers, has been condemned as the most disastrous opening ever devised. I’m trying despicably hard to disagree with the general consensus, and I’m failing miserably. In all honestly, I kinda, sorta liked the theme. The guitar riffs in the beginning, despite screaming generic pop rock, was catchy. I thought it was quite fighting for such a genre, until the poor man started to sing. It was shocking to say the least, his voice brings croaking to a new level. The line that stuck with me the most from the lyrics was something about a vulture screeching, only because a screeching vulture is the only way to describe the sound. The animation was also pretty generic, nothing to write home about.
Plot Kita Michiru, the female protagonist, is sprawled across the floor in a pool of blood, a large wound down her stomach. Standing nonchalantly in front of her are the other two protagonists, Shonen A and Shonen B, Shito Tachibana and Chika Akatuski respectively.
“Will you die?” One of them asks. Unable to find an answer to his inquiry, Kita begins to ponder how she got herself in this mess. “Why?” She muses.
Basically, the whole plot is triggered by the clumsy Michiru stepping on Chika’s hand. As strange and odd as this may sound, that is how the three of them met. Michiru, armful of prepackaged lunches, dashes down an empty school corridor that looks more like something out of Dracula than a high school, she trips as she steps on something and falls, the lunches sent flying. Fixing her glasses, she looks up to see Chika and Kita standing before her. She begins to apologize profusely as Shito bends down and helps her pick up her lunches. Shito also tells her that her glasses are askew, and with that they leave.
Michiru brings the lunches to her ‘friends’, who are all incredibly mean and bitchy. Aside from making her their servant, they call her clumsy and klutzy. Apparently, Michiru forgot to pick up one of their lunches when she dropped them and the other girl is upset. Just in time, Chika drops the dropped lunch in front of Michiru as he passes, Kita telling her to be careful next time. Stunned by this interaction between their klutzy servant and the two boys, Michiru’s friends ask her why “Shonen B” did that and why “Shonen A” smiled at her. Dubbed “Shonen A and B” because their names weren’t released to the public after their survival in a tragic accident half a year ago, Chika and Shito are the two allusive males idolized in the high school. Michiru begins to space out and one of her ‘friends’ steals her glasses. This proves to be the most traumatic thing ever and Michiru freaks out because without her specs, she’ll see the black rings around people’s necks. Both Chika and Kita have the black rings and upon seeing them, Michiru screams and faints.
Elsewhere, after leaving the cafeteria, Shito tells Chika to be careful with his hand. He pulls the dismembered body part handcuffed to something, from the pocket of his jacket and hands it to Chika. Kita threatens to kill him the next time Chika’s careless with the body part. The white haired boy simply scoffs and replies, “As if you can.”
Waking up in the infirmary, Michiru overhears the nurse and doctor talking about missing students. Then the nurse tells her to get some rest and she can leave later. Michiru wakes up after dark and is running through the courtyard, wondering why the nurse woke her up so late, when a hand reaches out and grabs her shoulders. She squeals, loudly. It turns out to be Chika, who tells her to be careful. Just as he was about to leave, he extends his hand towards her. She tells him that she’s capable of walking home alone and that he doesn’t have to hold her hand. However, Chika is actually asking her for money, “disturbance fee” for bumping into him, totaling to 1050 yen. Michiru doesn’t have the money and from then on Chika refers to her as “500 yen.”
Tailing Chika after this encounter, Michiru finds the two boys at a graveyard, exchanging hands, literally. Both detachs their hands and is about to switch when Michiru steps forward and squeals again. Having been compromised, a gun materializes from Shito’s hand and he suggests that they kill her. Before he pulls the trigger, a dog emerges from the bushes. Causing Michiru to squeal again, Chika puts on his own hand from before and generates a katana from his palm. He slays the dog and Michiru yelps at the sight of the bloody corpse. After the little altercation is over, both aim their weapons at the girl, resolving to kill her.
Shito’s finger begins curling around the trigger, and with a bang he fires. The dog from before is still alive, as is Michiru, holding her head, eyes squeezed shut. The demonic dog leaps at Shito but is knocked back by a single bullet from his revolver. Now, the thing’s really dead. Chika points his sword at the dog and blue orbs of light begin emerging from the body and circling his sword. With a smile, Chika acknowledges the dog’s wishes and in a fine display of lights and colors sends his, what I’m assuming to be the doggy’s soul, to heaven. “Funeral complete.”
Pulling out a little calculator of sorts, Chika checks for how much that dog was ‘worth,” not much apparently. Frustrated by this, he blames Michiru, “500 yen.” Michiru, gathering her courage to speak, tells them that since she’s a nice person, they will die soon since they have black rings around their necks. Confused by this, the boys look to each other. Before they are able to ask what she meant by her statement, she flees. Michiru returns home to hear her aunt and uncle bickering over her, her uncle asking why they had to look after her with his own money, her aunt replying that it’s because he didn’t want to look bad after his sister died. Obviously hurt by this, after announcing her return home, Michiru retreats to her room. She thinks back to her parents death and mutters that she doesn’t want to see it anymore.
The next day at school, her friends present her with a new shopping list and just as Michiru sets out, she is caught by Chika and Shito, much to the surprise of her friends. They tell her friends that Michiru is now their servant and not to boss her around anymore. Dragging her away, Chika asks if she enjoys being an idiot. She replies that they are her friends with much difficulty. Chika and Shito takes her to the city and asks her to help them find people with rings around their necks. She refuses, claiming that she knows nothing about the rings or anything they are talking about.
Michiru finally gets fed up and yells that they are not her friends, she will not do anything they tell her to because they’re not her friends. Amused by her outburst, Chika remarks that she can say no to people. Regardless of her acquiescences to their demands, they take her to Z-Loan. Walking up the stairs, Chika explains that Z is the last latter of the alphabet. On their way into the office, a stocky, menacing man emerges, Chika lightheartedly teasing him in jest. He snarls as he passes, scaring Michiru slightly. As they enter the office, she hears a woman yelling at someone on the phone and freaks out. Chika asks Yuuta where Watamori (?) is, the woman’s demeanor immediately changes upon hearing they have a customer. Watamori turns out to be a blonde man that runs the Z-Loan business. He remarks that since Chika and Shito brought her there, she’s interested in one of ‘those’ loans, however it’ll be of no use to her since she’s dead. He hands her his card and tells her to come back when she’s dead. The boys explain to him that she’s the one with the eyes, the shinigami eyes. This freaks out Michiru as Shito explains that the rings are meant for the Shinigami to see when he needs to behead the people approaching death. Yuuta jumps in with a demonstration, scaring Michiru even more.
She still blatantly refuses, saying that she doesn’t want to kill people. Chika explains that it’s not killing people because they’re already dead. It’s just to pay back their debt and help them get to where they belong, Shito adds. Still resilient, Michiru professes that since both their rings are black, they’re going to die and it’s dangerous. Chika smirks and comments that it wouldn’t be right to call them dead. Nor would it be to call them alive, Shito finishes. The two boys drag Michiru back outside and this time she helps them. Taking off her glances, she spots a person. Once again dragged off to investigate the ringed person, she mumbles that the wind was in her eye. It turns out that the ring was a person’s necklace. Shito apologizes to the woman while Chika berates Michiru for her mistake. She repeats this several times with different people.
At the end of their adventure, as the three of them rest near a couple of vending machines, Michiru asks Shito if he and Chika are really zombies. Shito replies that, well, yeah. The only difference is that zombies have no real will or purpose, while he and Chika are determined to live. Michiru states that she’s content with her life but if she were to die, she wouldn’t fight for her life. A sudden change occurs in Shito and he coldly asks her to die. Taken aback by the question, she is at a loss for words. Shito calls her scum, worse than zombies because she is dying as she lives, not knowing the pains of a fatal wound. Michiru returns home, exhausted from the activity. As she washes her face, she sees a grey ring appearing around her neck.
The ending, Chain Ring by MUCC was a little bit better, once again, nothing to really get worked up over. The only thing that I’m curious about is all people featured in the ending. A whole slew of characters are there, none of them save for the Z-Loan people are introduced.
Preview “To die or not to die, that is the question” Apparently, next episode, Michiru’s going to die and the scene earlier this episode will be explained.
Impressions Overall, I liked it. The animation was average, the characters were average, the plot was average, it was average. It’s nothing like Death Note or Gurren Lagann, far from it in fact. But as I said before, it looks fun. The backstory was basically spelled out letter by letter in this episode, leaving open a few plot lines, like Michiru’s parents, why she’s going to die next episode and what exactly this whole Zombie Loan thing was about. The music, aside from the opening, was quite good, it enhanced that eerie atmosphere of the show, especially during the cemetery-fight-scene. The backgrounds are all in various shades of bleak colors, like a sewer green color, or gray, it had a real depressing feel to it.
I really liked both Shito and Chika, they’re the stereotypical anime duo. The problem that really worries me is who ends up with Michiru. It’s obvious that there will be some sort of romance happening between at least two of the three. From the looks of it, it may be Chika and Michiru, he’s already holding her hand half the time, dragging her around. From the first parts of the episode, I was under the impression that they might’ve paired up Shito and Michiru, but after his little outburst towards the end, I’m not so sure anymore. Alas, it’s only the first episode and it could swing in any direction from here. I’m also expecting, in the near future, a tremendous amount of yaoi fandom regarding Shito and Chika. The fact that they’re basically handcuffed to each other just screams yaoi fangirl.
Now, a bit of screaming from the pure het fangirl: Despite the fact that the animation and character design rubs me the wrong way sometimes, Chika and Shito are pretty hot. I’m not really into the white haired type, for some reason, the rash, somewhat obtuse type just never appealed to me. Shito, on the other hand, the completely silent, almost unreadable, black haired Shonen A, is precisely what I’m looking for! And he uses a revolver! I’m not big on revolvers, but I’m even less interested in swords. And, a bonus, Takahiro Sakurai, the seiyuu for Cloud Strife (FF7), Kanda (D.Gray Man), Haruka (Tactics) and Bit Cloud (from Zoids, yes, I watched it), voices Shito! Both Chika and Shito have such delicious voices, Kenichi Suzumara (Lavi, Zack) voicing Chika. What surprised me even more was that Houko Kuwashima voiced Michiru. She’s literally in everything, FMA, Rahxephon, Angelic Layer, Claymore, Dennou Coil, Ergo Proxy, Dr. Slump (oiy) and it just goes on and on and on. An all star cast for this show, as far as I can tell.
Anyways, to end my ramblings, I shall continue to blog about this. It’s intriguing if anything and a distraction from my prep school.
Surprising enough, I’m very much into the white-haired type. 😀 And swords. 😀 x2 I’m just glad that neither Shito nor Chika is quite as stereotypical as they first appear. Ok, they aren’t unfathomably deep, but at least they are interesting.
And hot. 😛