In More Ways Than One, Anime Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead Speaks to the Current Moment in Labor

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.

And even as Zom 100 pivots away from depicting hellish desk jobs after his initial episode, it continues to focus on the exhilaration of finally quitting a gig you hate, something that is likely familiar to many in the wake of what has been dubbed the “Great Resignation.” For those unfamiliar with the term, during the COVID-19 pandemic, a surge of people left their positions, culminating in a 20-year high quit rate in America. The pandemic has been cited as a breaking point where a flood of people sought better pay or where service workers left their roles after their employers callously put them in harm’s way during a public health emergency. While the series’ source material was written before the pandemic, its story reflects how, much like many people in the real world, it took life-changing circumstances for Akira to finally break free of the job that was ruining his life, conveying how social and economic pressures can make changing careers difficult.

But although this narrative has adroitly portrayed a shared sense of exhaustion with the current state of labor and the joy of pursuing something new, it often seems like it doesn’t afford the same empathetic lens to the women in this story. The most glaring example is Ohtori, a co-worker Akira has a crush on, who is granted minimal characterization beyond acting as the protagonist’s idealized version of a partner. We eventually learn that she is their boss’ mistress, which is presented less as gross because a superior is seemingly holding their power over a subordinate to force them into a relationship and more because it hurts the main character’s feelings. While later episodes do a moderately improved job at cluing us into the inner lives of women trying to survive the apocalypse, the leering camera, which emulates the male gaze of shlocky zombie flicks, does its best to undermine these attempts. To be fair, it’s still only five episodes in, so its possible things will improve on this front, especially since its entire main cast hasn’t been introduced yet, but it’s unfortunate that only the male characters have been able to enjoy being freed from their oppressive jobs so far.

Additionally, circumstances outside the series’ text also make it somewhat difficult to fully engage with its messaging. It has already run into substantial production issues, resulting in the fourth episode being delayed from streaming services, while the fifth was pushed back a week altogether. These delays generally indicate that the people working on a project are subject to the kind of brutal crunch depicted in Zom 100’s pilot. Although there doesn’t seem to be specific reporting on the situation at Bug Films, who are producing the series, if other projects are any indication, these circumstances likely bode ill for those creating it. And while we may not know the exact situation in this case, the anime industry is so inundated with problems that low pay and overwork are more or less an expectation across many projects.

Rough labor conditions are the norm across many anime studios, and a translated interview from Toshio Okada, a producer at Studio Gainax, offers a breakdown of why. According to Okada, a flood of investment has led to more anime being produced than ever before, but very little of this wealth makes its way to the people working on it. This happens because budgets for individual projects are capped by the production committees (essentially a hodgepodge of different companies that act as investors) who pay a lump sum for a studio to create the show, limiting how much makes it to the creatives. This format, where production committees foot the bill, means that animation studios incur less risk from a series failing, but it also means that they reap very little of the benefits of breakout successes. And considering most animators on the projects are freelance contractors anyway, they receive few of the security benefits that studios get from these arrangements with the production committees. While a flood of investment in the anime industry has resulted in more programs being greenlit than ever before, employees continue to be severely overworked, seemingly contributing to the uptick in delays across the industry.

And beyond the world of anime production, the entertainment industry is generally rife with exploitation, which is a major reason why the ongoing SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes are so necessary. Hotbed issues like the portent of AI eating up gigs, a lack of residuals, and a plethora of other problems showcase how capital-guzzling CEOs and shareholders are fleecing creators in film and television production. Although things have been undeniably grim, these strikes demonstrate the ways that workers can use collective action to pressure studios, potentially winning back some of their leverage. We are finally seeing this sentiment bleed into the particularly poorly treated VFX industry, as artists working for Marvel have taken steps toward unionization. Similarly, South Korean actors in Netflix originals who have long been underpaid and were sometimes compensated as low as $300 for roles in the mega-hit Squid Game are campaigning to be paid residuals.

In light of the strikes, we’ve already seen mask-off comments from the studio executives, such as when one said their strategy was to “allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” presumably so that owners could buy their umpteenth yacht instead of paying their employees a living wage. That said, the unified front of SAG-AFTRA and WGA seems to be putting on the pressure. Just a month after making tone-deaf, dismissive statements about the worker’s demands, the CEO of Disney, Bob Iger, said that the studios are looking to end the strike “quickly.” While it’s unclear if this comment is a negotiating tactic or a reflection of the workers’ pressure campaign having an effect, these strikes are justifiably here to stay until an agreement is reached.

Although there are numerous reasons why labor organization attempts haven’t taken off in the modern anime industry, such as the prevalence of freelance work making collective bargaining difficult, it’s possible that the current worldwide push for better working conditions across entertainment spaces and elsewhere, combined with the untenable circumstances at many studios, could cause some form of action to materialize. Until then, even relatively incisive anime about modern work like Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead will maintain what could be described as either an awkward dissonance or cruel irony between its subject matter and the material conditions that seemingly produced it.

Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to watching the latest anime and prestige television, he also loves film, videogames, and creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to. You can follow him on Twitter @eli_gonzalez11.

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