Title: Zombie-Loan
Genre: Action/Drama
Company: NAS/XEBEC/Zombie-Loan Production Team
Format: 11 episodes
Dates: 4 Jul 2007 - 12 Sep 2007

Synopsis: Akatsuki Chika and Tachibana Shito are known around school as Shounen A and Shounen B due to the fact that they were the only survivors of an accident… except for the fact that, truthfully, they weren’t. Chika and Shito in fact died, and have been revived by a loan company known as Zombie-Loan in order to hunt zombies for the company. Michiru Kita, who has the ability to see death in the form of black rings around the necks of people whose deaths are imminent, one day stumbles upon this secret, which changes her life.

The Highlights
Art and animation: To call it “mediocre” would be a compliment.
Story: Unfinished; a mere glimpse of the beginning of a story.
Characters: Most are pointless.
Mystery: Not the greatest written, but a small highlight.
Ending: Clumsily epitomizes a forgettable anime.

Beginning with a backhanded compliment, one of the best things about Zombie-Loan is that it’s over quickly. This is unfortunately a series that, try as it might (and, in honesty, with the budget it’s been dealt, there’s no reason for it to try very hard) it just can’t do anything well. The premise is generic, the characters are worse, the plot goes nowhere, and the less said about the animation and music, the better. This isn’t the worst anime I’ve seen, but I have seen a lot of bad anime, after all.

Saying Zombie-Loan has no ambition is putting it lightly. Here we have yet another series that takes a supernatural entity and lets them hunt other supernatural entities that pose a risk to normal humans. It’s the premise of virtually every second action anime, and only very few series can make it interesting these days. For the most part, the series is happy to dwell in its own shallowness, with sloppy action sequences and moé fanservice making the hook, but occasionally it does rise above the superficial, particularly when it makes itself out to be a detective mystery. The problem with these scenes is that they take the roundabout route to reach conclusions that, had they ignored all the obvious red herring clues, would have reached in much quicker time. But I wouldn’t have minded this series if it tried to be Da Vinci Code, anime style, more often, since ultimately the majority of screen time requires little to no thinking from the audience.

The characters are all archetypes. Chika and Shito are stoic bishounen, while Michiru is your overwhelmed (and overwhelming) moé protagonist and these are the characters that actually get any semblance of character development. Pretty much everyone else in the cast is useless; they’re either to be plot devices or excuses for fanservice. The character development for Chika and Shito, as little of it as there was, makes the cerebral highlight of the series, as well as the few scenes where Zombie-Loan analyses the impact the whole zombie phenomenon has on the people they leave behind. It’s not something pointless action series tend to consider, and for that Zombie-Loan does deserve some credit. What it doesn’t deserve credit for is a terrible ending: the whole sequence was little more than “save the bishounen in distress”, while the series ends with about half a million unanswered question… although at this stage I found it difficult to care about the answers.

Ultimately, Zombie-Loan suffers from commercial-for-a-manga syndrome, but I’m not sure who’d be intrigued after such an inane story and sloppy aesthetic effort driving its boring fights and faux mystery. Maybe if it had less generic characters and cliched premise, it’d be better, but that would make it a completely different series, wouldn’t it? There are highlights in this series, but when they comprise a mere twenty-odd minutes in an eleven episode run, I’m not sure why one should bother.

The Rating: 3

Reviewed by: Sorrow-kun