SChool-livE!

released OUT NOW! 2015 | 15 | Blu-ray & dVd (dual format)

Director Masaomi ando Cast Inori Minase, ari Ozawa, rie Takahashi, MaO

School-Live! mixes one genre that SFX readers will know very well, and a very different genre that’s infamous among anime fans. It starts as what the latter tribe would call a “cute schoolgirls doing cute things” show. Yes, that’s a genre in Japan, often aimed at males older than school age, and... ah, half the readers have bailed to the next review.

Still with us? The reason why School-Live! is interesting is because of its twist at the end of part one (spoilers follow). The series starts plotlessly, showing a cheery big-eyed girl buzzing round her bustling Japanese school, where she belongs to a tiny club (called “School Living”) with three other girls. But at the episode’s end, it’s revealed that she’s actually chronically delusional. Her school is a bloody ruin, and her fellow club members are the only remaining survivors of a zombie apocalypse.

Even after this reveal, this is very much a hybrid show, with a lot of, well, cute cartoon stuff with cute cartoon girls. For an anime with hints of horror, there isn’t much gore and the zombies themselves are mostly only half-seen. But if you stay with it, the show gets you to like its characters enough so that the final episodes are remarkably affecting when things threaten to go the way of Night Of The Living Dead.

Extras Clean titles. Andrew Osmond