In More Ways Than One, Anime Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead Speaks to the Current Moment in Labor
Photo Courtesy of Viz Media
In a relatively light summer for anime, Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead has proven to be an unexpected, pleasant surprise. With little idea of its premise beyond that it was another zombie apocalypse story, I assumed it would emulate one of the common strands of the genre, making it some manner of a cynical survival tale, campy splatterfest, or maybe a sarcastic, satirical spin on this material. But while there is a lot of the second category in its execution, what I didn’t expect was for it to share a great deal of thematic overlap with the recent string of TV series that explore exploitative economic systems, such as Squid Game or Severance.
This focus on how modern workers are increasingly alienated from their careers is front and center in Zom 100’s attention-grabbing pilot. Akira is fresh out of college and is thrilled to have landed an office job at an advertising firm. At first, things seem normal enough—he’s given a cordial greeting by his new employer and is taken out for drinks after hours. However, as he’s ready to head home, his co-workers matter-of-factly state that it’s time to return to the office. They go back, working through the night and sleeping under their desks, encroaching deadlines cited as the cause of their death march. This situation is initially almost played off as comedic due to exaggerated facial reactions and a humorously over dramatic use of a fisheye lens, but soon, crushing despair sets in.
Color saps out of the frame as Akira finds that this constant crunch isn’t an exception but the norm for his new workplace. We see how this office’s exploitative work culture is enforced from above and below, as a verbally abusive boss threatens to replace those who don’t fall in line while underlings brag about the amount of unpaid overtime they’ve logged. Although it may be tempting to question why Akira doesn’t simply quit, this sequence conveys that he’s conditioned to accept his lot by the surrounding acquiescence to this status quo. Oppressive years pass by in a few repetitive minutes. By the end of this stretch, the claustrophobic aspect ratio and sepia-toned aesthetic match our protagonist’s deadened stare, as the never-ending stress of it all saps every trace of joy out of his life. His shambling mannerisms not so subtly clue us into how he’s already been transformed into the walking dead.
However, as he shambles to his job one morning, things irrevocably change. As he attempts to pay an overdue bill, he finds that his landlord has been transformed, candy-colored viscera adorning his face as he consumes another tenant. Akira flees, a pack of fast-moving undead quickly on his tail, and his first thought is that he’s going to be late to the office. But as he reaches the roof and witnesses the surrounding carnage of a widespread outbreak, he comes to a sudden realization—the onset of the zombie apocalypse means that he doesn’t have to go to work anymore! He tears through the letterboxed frame that’s been confining him as color suddenly returns to the world. Impact frames and a kinetic chase scene communicate our protagonist’s turning point as he exuberantly races through a crumbling metropolis.
While in another context or with different delivery, his joy over the end times would come across as deeply misanthropic, here we see how the endless grind of his everyday life pushed him to the brink. These circumstances are extreme, but Akira’s reaction highlights a darkly relatable impulse that many other rightfully disgruntled workers share (and it also perfectly ties into an incredibly relevant sketch from the latest season of Tim Robinson’s I Think You Should Leave).
I’ll admit that even after this impressive premiere, I still expected the story to almost entirely pivot away from its intriguing underlying themes about labor towards being, you know, a zombie thing. Although that is partially true, as the status quo has irreversibly changed and the undead have overrun Tokyo, most of the next few episodes still find good ways to critique the pre-disaster world. For instance, Akira eventually tries to reach out to his best friend from college, Kencho, who he had drifted apart from because his extreme work hours left little time for social life. A wedge was driven between them when Kencho suggested that his buddy quit his oppressive job after he went on about his own financially lucrative real-estate gig, which Akira took as a braggadocious insult.
However, things fully loop back to the story’s criticism of modern labor when we find that even the outwardly successful Kencho was miserable due to the vacuous conniving his position required. One of his greatest regrets is that he abandoned his true dream of becoming a comedian because he didn’t think he could make a living off it. Despite the ongoing disaster, Kencho resolves to follow through on what he always wanted to do because he’s finally been freed from his former occupation. We also meet other characters who have interesting ties to their former careers, some of whom carry forward their fastidious old habits to the detriment of their mental health, as others are reminded of why they pursued their careers in the first place before unfair conditions sapped the pleasure from it.
I think one of the reasons that Zom 100, and other stories focusing on growing dissatisfaction with modern work, hit particularly hard right now is because of the increasingly grim economic realities for most over the last few decades. To quickly put it into numbers, in America before the pandemic, the inflation-adjusted earnings of the average worker had remained largely stagnant since the ‘80s while the cost of living increased substantially over that same period. Moreover, many of these problems have disproportionately affected young people, and in 2020, Millennials only controlled 4.6% of U.S. wealth, which is a sharp drop-off compared to Baby Boomers owning 21% when they were the same age. This seeming uptick in popular works of fiction engaging with these issues is likely a reflection of these widely felt realities. Although this series never directly surfaces the economic circumstances of its protagonist, it seems implied that one of the reasons Akira stays at his job is because he thinks that he may not be able to get a better one that would allow him to keep paying his Tokyo rent.