Alice in Deadly School (2021)

_{anilist | myanimelist}

Alice in Deadly School is a 35-minute OVA about naïve teenagers stuck on their high school’s roof after zombies took over the first floor. Alice causes a Fukusaku ‘Battle Royale’ ‘-like inversion of tropes by capturing the essence of anime stereotypes and imposing individual trauma onto them. Here the student council president is not the one with the glasses; the delinquent doesn’t smoke, and the funny girl feels lonely because she’s weird.

While Alice in Deadly School’s main conflict is its zombie apocalypse, its underlying theme is about a younger Japanese generation disillusioned with their failing authority. At some point the army crashes a helicopter because zombies overwhelm them, after which a girl stoically remarks “no one is coming for us.”. These teenagers are left stranded by their role models’ imperfections, and with nobody to look up to they struggle to embrace maturity themselves. Their abandonment issues cause such a distrust that even the student council president and softball captain crumble under the pressure of assumed authority themselves.

The zombies aren’t horrifying until we realize each of them was a bundle of aspirations whose lives were forcibly cut short as nobody supported them through their ultimately futile struggle. Director Shigeyasu Yamauchi (Casshern Sins) isolates his living characters in open spaces because these girls feel too small and alone, trapped in the massive world they inhabit. The girls’ only place of comfort, the high school, has an oily filter as if their happy memories are physically melting away.

Yet, rather than nihilistically succumbing to their predicament the girls decide to take matters in their own hands. In an anti-establishment bent they decide to confide in each other’s individual strengths instead of waiting on an army that won’t arrive anyway. Despite most girls meeting an unfortunate demise Alice in Deadly School finds catharsis by arguing we only have each other to rely on: the science club’s last effort is devising a bomb for an escape route; the softball pitcher receives one final throw to save her schoolmates, the piano girl and aspiring pop idol fulfill their dreams as they’re heard in their ultimate performances, and one part of a manzai duo lets her partner know she’s always there in her heart no matter how lonely the world is.

Yamauchi bolsters Alice in Deadly School’s permeating sapphic anxiety, coming-of-age tragedy, and anti-establishment rebellion with dramatic lighting and color palettes changing along the scene’s tone. It revels in moments of soft surrealism where a girl’s perception alters the environment, either offering her escapism or amplifying claustrophobia. The director uses exaggerative perspectives and (off-)centers his characters into big suffocating spaces of loneliness which are juxtaposed by close-ups. Kiyoshi Tateishi’s character designs intensify the tragedy, as the cast’s faces are the only soft thing left in this apocalypse. Yamauchi’s aesthetic flourishes cover up the OVA’s somewhat cheap look, but if anything the thriftiness evokes the sensation of late-90s Japanese underground which sought to maximize the power of every frame by coalescing character and location into a feeling, without telling you what you’re supposed to feel outright.

It’s confusing that Alice in Deadly School is… this. It was dead on arrival as a tangential prequel to Gekidol, a poorly received idol show with none of its cast or staff appearing here. Yet Yamauchi manages to squeeze out the year’s cinematic highlight in 35 minutes of anxiety. Alice in Deadly School is panned and might not be your cup of tea, but its sympathetic core of anti-establishment teenagers resonates so deep with me I can’t help but consider it my anime of the year.