The first episode of Zom 100 is one hell of a showcase of inventive, fresh, and very bombastic animation and direction, all packaged together with clear intent. It’s well worth looking into the team behind it and its rising star of a director, but also into the risks in their approach.

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The glorious first episode of Zom 100 begins with a highly cinematic sequence. Dynamic, at points first-person camerawork to frame cuts so ambitious that even such an outstanding animation effort can struggle to keep up with the underlying ideas. Beautiful shots that evoke the horror of a zombie outbreak before it is in full display, composited so that another feeling is conveyed on a technical level—the idea that this is being filmed by an actual camera, as implied by quirks like the noticeable chromatic aberration and depth of field. And of course, the cinemascope aspect ratio, a traditional sign that we’re in fact watching a movie.

The camera zooms out of the protagonist’s eye as he is indeed watching a zombie flick on TV while eating instant noodles. And yet, despite this being an office worker’s ordinary routine on paper, many of those same filmic traits remain the exact same after the hectic intro. It’s hard not to notice his sickly expression, the deliberately stiff character acting, or the fact that he outright said a zombie outbreak would be preferable to going to work. He collapses, wishing that he didn’t have to work the next day. In around the length of your standard opening sequence, Zom 100 has already made its point—though it certainly hasn’t run out of fun ideas, so you better stick around.

A flashback takes us back 3 years, to the day when protagonist Akira Tendo joined his workplace. These memories are immediately brighter and more colorful than anything we’ve seen before, befitting his enthusiasm over his new job, but that doesn’t mean that the visual presentation changes completely; if anything, those lens effects first seen within the zombie movie are more noticeable than ever, and we’re even greeted back by the black bars of the cinematic aspect ratio. On a layout and shot composition level, the theatrical intent remains noticeable as well. Though this aspect may be harder to grasp for some viewers, it’s in Zom 100’s unsubtle heart to provide some clear examples; Akira’s first tour of the office is framed in first person and uses his blinking as means of transition, much like the movie that the start opened up as its protagonist’s eyelids did, following that with a POV shot. Just a few seconds later, he’s already meeting the love of his life, which is also presented with the flashy flair of a bombastic movie with romance elements. It’s almost like there is a theme.

A nifty wipe, just one of the many cool transitions in the episode, takes us to the warm colors of Akira’s welcome party. Unfortunately for him, this is also the point where the gig is finally up, as he finds out that the actual welcome event is the first of countless all-nighters. The literal and figurative filthiness of his workplace is now in full display, as the episode neatly uses editing tricks like time-lapses and jump cuts to convey how Akira’s days are becoming an exhausting, blurred-together nightmare. We’re talking about the same bright protagonist that only recently joined this company bursting with enthusiasm, though, so he quickly bounces back. This is portrayed through a particularly brilliant sequence, relying on many of these recurring visual tricks, as well as a clear contrast between the cold tones of his job and the warm colors of his passion… or should I say delusion at this point, since it’s followed by a hilarious scene that highlights the massive difference between his optimistic read and the actual reality.

At this point in the episode, you might be asking yourself two things. The first one is why the constantly flaunted logo of Akira’s company, which was completely nondescript in the original, feels sorta familiar to you—the answer being that it’s very clearly inspired by a major anime studio. In fact, it happens to be the same company that Zom 100’s core team used to belong to before going independent as a studio of their own; an event recent enough that, when this project got going, many of its central figures were still physically working at OLM.

Though this might not be quite as savage of a dunk as some viewers have interpreted it as, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d even gotten someone’s approval for this entire gag, the ruthlessness is undeniable. OLM are a large studio that has been going through a messy period marked by the dissolution of many production lines and the overloading of others to further increase their output, nightmarish schedules all around, and even franchises that traditionally had great production buffers watching those crumble. Even if intended as kind of a joke, representing OLM precisely as a media production company with nightmarish working conditions by staff who just left them can only be read a certain way; perhaps best represented by the catharsis expressed by their Malaysian staff at OLM Asia, who really felt like this hit close to home.

The other major question that might pop up in your head at this point, this time in a happier tone, is the identity of the director. Their storyboards do a great job in illustrating Akira’s headspace amidst this hellish experience, quite literally showing the box he has to seal his feelings into to avoid completely falling apart. There are stylistic hints as to who the director behind those inspired choices might be, like the somewhat diegetic typography, but you could very well believe that the likes of Takayuki Hirao were behind this episode; such is the neat editing that emphasizes both the physical and emotional continuity of Akira’s torment, giving a pleasant rhythm to events that are anything but. Incidentally, if you liked these scenes, I strongly recommend watching Hirao’s Pompo the Cinephile, since that’s a movie specifically about filmmaking with wildly entertaining editing, and also serving as an escape valve for a creator who’d piled up dark feelings—quite the unhealthy view of creative work compared to Zom 100, though!

In a way, that lack of an immediately recognizable directorial style despite the demonstrable skill feels like part of Kazuki Kawagoe’s identity, especially at this still early point in his career. He joined the anime industry just over a decade ago, doing management work on franchises like Pokemon. It took him quite a few years to receive storyboarding and directing jobs—and even when he did, with the exception of some nice opening sequences, it was under such limitations that he did not shine in the way he does now. Like many other industries that deal with commercial art, anime systemically holds back many creators with tremendous potential, be it by placing them in restrictive projects or outright denying them the role where their voice is best heard. And as an episode director for long-running series without particularly high production values, Kawagoe was one such creator.

Even as someone who closely follows the industry, his identity was unknown to me—but again, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t already capable of excellent work. In a brief escapade on Dogakobo’s Koisuru Asteroid under a pseudonym, his excellent episode #05 already had me wondering who the mystery director with Kyoto flair could have been. While his ability was largely unknown from the outside, though, there was someone who got to see it in person: his OLM co-workers, most notoriously Hiroaki Kojima, head of the appropriately named Team Kojima at the studio. After heading a few respectable but ultimately modest projects there, Kojima was ready to take everything to the next level with the much-awaited adaptation of Komi Can’t Communicate. To do so, he relied on renowned veterans like chief director Ayumu Watanabe, who has become a recurring ally of his, but also on the sheer potential he saw in Kawagoe. And, more sneakily, this was also the moment when he founded his own studio Bug Films, which was immediately credited for production assistance on the episodes led by the core team still at OLM.

Komi-san and Kawagoe burst into the scene with a tremendously vibrant first episode and opening sequence, the type that turns heads across the entire planet. The wealth of fun character animation on the backs of artists like Hayato Torii, William Lee, and Haruyoshi Nomura felt like Kojima’s statement about the ability of his team; whether that was representative of their consistent greatness or not is something we’ll discuss later, as that involves more aspects than the undeniable skill of those animators. But more interestingly, both the episode and intro showcased different sides of Kawagoe than we’d seen in his episodes in the past, or even in current works like Zom 100.

The underlying qualities like his sense for editing remain the same, but even when applying similar techniques, Kawagoe is the type of director who feels very conscious about gearing his style to each work; earlier I’d mentioned the diegetic text in Zom 100 as a tell of his, but in a more comedic first episode like Komi-san’s and given the context of the titular character communicating through notes, the in-world presence of the signs and onomatopoeia is used in uniquely amusing ways. As a viewer, his inventiveness, those seemingly broad influences coupled with a desire to adapt them to specific situations, felt truly fresh—and, having spoken with people working around him, that is how he comes across to his peers too.

There’s no easier way to appreciate that freshness than going back to the first episode of Zom 100 where we left it. After undergoing the grind for 3 years, Akira has grown dull and numb to everything—best represented through the once muted colors shifting into actual greyscale. This deeply tired office worker can barely see what is happening around him anymore, and Kawagoe effectively puts us in his shoes with this change in the palette. One that, for example, effectively obscures rivers of blood that would have normally been an alarming bright red. It’s not until he comes face to face with the zombie feasting on his building manager that Akira begins realizing there is a bit of an outbreak going on. And, rather than further traumatize him, this is the event that starts bringing some color back to his life.

The ensuing zombie chase is depicted through the most comedic animation we’ve seen yet, a joy palpable in the looseness, in its timing, and in the fun staging itself. The flames of the planes falling off from the sky and exploding into the city become yellow petals that bring a warmth to Akira’s life we hadn’t seen since his welcome party. And then it finally hits him. He won’t be late to work because of this zombie outbreak, because there is no work anymore. He symbolically sheds his suit, gets rid of Not-OLM’s employee id, and bursts through the cinematic black bars that had framed his traumatic life before exploding into galactic joy. Kawagoe’s unsubtle hand is finally on full display: the reason why the cinematic stylings from the intro were applied even more strongly while narrating Akira’s work life is that those years were to him the actual zombie movie, scarier than any film could hope to be. Hell, scarier than an actual zombie outbreak currently is!

The rest of the episode basks in Akira’s joy in a way that, even among high-profile TV productions, we rarely get to see. He’s having the time of his life being reckless amidst the apocalypse, and the animation clearly conveys that. Having decided that he’s best off using this newly gained but potentially fleeting freedom to do what he always desired, his zero-regret life begins with a ridiculous quest to confess to his crush. Even as the tragedy makes itself apparent, the outrageous comedic spin the episode gives it makes it hard not to smile; especially when it once again uses cheesy romance movie framing to portray his confession… to someone who’d rather eat his brains now.

To be perfectly honest, Zom 100 could end right there and it would have already accomplished what it set out to do. Despite being able to function as one, though, this is not a short film—it’s the first episode of a TV show that’s set to run for the next 3 months, which has its fun upsides as well as pretty scary downsides. If you’re a fan of B horror and zombie movies in particular, you’re in for a treat; the unashamedly trashy tendencies you can see in spots for this first episode weren’t fooling you, as Zom 100 does indeed become a goofy romp where naked butts are used to tempt zombie sharks into deathly traps. At the same time, though, executing those outrageous ideas with the energy level Kawagoe’s team exhibited in this first episode is going to be hard. Or rather, it’s absolutely impossible.

If there’s one thing that Kojima’s team has gained notoriety for among the people who follow the industry closely, it’s their deeply unbalanced productions. Especially under Kawagoe’s lead, they put together tremendously ambitious starts that they have no way to follow through on; be it as part of the overworked OLM, or now as an independent Bug Films that technically only has a couple dozen employees of their own, they simply have no means to maintain this level at the pace that Kojima intends to put out titles. That is worthy of criticism to him, but when doing so, it’s important to understand that he’s not dumb by any means. Kojima has noticed the sheer impact that episodes like this one, Komi-san’s intro, or Summer Time Rendering’s peaks can have. He’s also aware that, as long as he’s working with directors with strong styles that can be maintained even as the production begins degrading, most viewers won’t notice that they pulled the rug from under them.

The risks of that approach, though, are beyond obvious. Obscene levels of outsourcingOutsourcing: The process of subcontracting part of the work to other studios. Partial outsourcing is very common for tasks like key animation, coloring, backgrounds and the likes, but most TV anime also has instances of full outsourcing (グロス) where an episode is entirely handled by a different studio. have been key to Kojima’s modern works getting released at a speedy pace while also having these bombastic moments, and to some degree, they have been able to get away with it. The first season of Komi-san had 8 out of its total 12 episodes fully outsourced to other studios, to the point that for most of its broadcast, specific assistance teams had animated more episodes than the supposedly main crew. Given that Kawagoe had set appealing directorial guidelines, and thanks to the core aces returning every now and then—admittedly, never with the strength of the first episode—most people at home never noticed this.

That tragically changed when the second season, ominously announced as “probably airing next spring”, clashed with their then upcoming Summer Time Rendering adaptation. Kawagoe’s appeal can only go so far, so a debilitated main team and increasingly lower quality outsourcing—as STR also required nearly a dozen of subcontracted episodes—led to a whole lot more people catching on to the severe struggles. Though it’s been misconstrued as such, the second season of Komi-san wasn’t more reliant on outsourcingOutsourcing: The process of subcontracting part of the work to other studios. Partial outsourcing is very common for tasks like key animation, coloring, backgrounds and the likes, but most TV anime also has instances of full outsourcing (グロス) where an episode is entirely handled by a different studio. than its predecessor; if anything, it “only” had 7 subcontracted episodes, a very slightly smaller number than in the first season. What it did, though, was expose the fundamental flaw in Kojima’s approach: it’s simply impossible to create animation at the highest profile with a team this small, unless you slow down the release pacing to a fraction of what it is now. And that brings us to the current situation, where that cycle is starting to repeat itself. After its fantastic first episode that poked fun at a certain studio where overwork is the norm, Zom 100’s team is now in its own zombification process, as the show’s schedule has already collapsed badly.

The reasons behind that are the same as ever: Kojima’s approach hasn’t changed one bit, as the studio already has other demanding projects looming on the horizon, and that remains highly incompatible with the ambition of creators like Kawagoe. Though this time I don’t expect quite the same level of outsourcingOutsourcing: The process of subcontracting part of the work to other studios. Partial outsourcing is very common for tasks like key animation, coloring, backgrounds and the likes, but most TV anime also has instances of full outsourcing (グロス) where an episode is entirely handled by a different studio. as in previous titles, its main team is still going to go through actual hell to finish this show at all, let alone retain any of the ambition seen in this first episode. While I’m not here to tell people to stop watching it, which would go against what those same people in the team want, it would be wise to keep expectations in check moving forward.

It’s also worth noting that, for as much flak as producers deserve for reckless planning like this, the situation here isn’t so black and white. Bug Film’s leadership is closer to their actual animation team than is the norm, since their board of directors is populated by active creators like Satoshi Nakano and Kawagoe himself. Though it failed in its goal of creating an umbrella to protect creators from the harsh environment of this industry, the studios that join Twin Engine’s umbrella are meant to at the very least treat their employees and contractors with the respect they deserve—a sentiment echoed by people at the studio, even if their recurring crunch is an unquestionable failure.

The first episode of Zom 100 is a truly fantastic ride, enabled by an up-and-coming star director and his recurring colleagues… but also reliant on a self-destructive approach that only works until it doesn’t, and tends to make people’s job into a living hell. And that, in a show that condemns workplaces like that, is quite a shame.

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