[1] Kaihō Norimitsu and Chiba Sadoru, School-Live! (New York, NY: Yen Press, 2015). Originally published by Houbunsha in Japan. 

[2] Gakkōgurashi!, 12 episodes, directed by Ando Masaomi, written by Kaihō Norimitsu, and produced by Lerche, aired from July 9 to Septembe 24, 2015, on AT-X, Tokyo MX, Sun TV, and BS11.

[3] Sara B. Pritchard, “An Envirotechnical Disaster: Nature, Technology, and Politics at Fukushima,” Environmental History 17, no. 2 (April 1, 2012): 219–43.

[4] John Oppliger, “Ask John: Is the Moé Boom Really Dying?,” AnimeNation (blog), August 30, 2010.

[5] Lady Saika, “The Moeblob vs. the Strong Female Character,” Lady Geek Girl and Friends (blog), December 24, 2012; Amelia Cook, “Moé, Misogyny and Masculinity: Anime’s Cuteness Problem–and How to Fix It,” The Mary Sue (blog), September 7, 2016.

[6] Oppliger, “Ask John,” para. 4.

[7] Aurel Kolnai, On Disgust, ed. Barry Smith and Carolyn Korsmeyer (Chicago: Open Court, 2003), 53.

[8] Benjamin Hagen, “Slow Reading (1.18): Deleuze’s DR (Pp. 18-19),” Sketching a Present, December 30, 2017.

[9] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 18.

[10] Hidenaga Otori, “Revolt, Dysfunction, Dementia: Toward the Body of ‘Empire,’” in How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in the Global Age (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2003), 102.

[11] Otori, 102.

[12] Otori, 102.

[13] Otori, 106.

[14] Ned Pennant-Rea, “The Dancing Plague of 1518,” The Public Domain Review, July 10, 2018, para. 2, 6.

[15] Kolnai, On Disgust, 73.

[16] Kolnai, 55.

[17] “Still Life,” in New World Encyclopedia, “Seventeenth century” para. 2, accessed June 17, 2019.

[18] Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Harvard University Press, 2007), 91.

[19] Ngai, 91.

[20] Otori, “Revolt, Dysfunction, Dementia: Toward the Body of ‘Empire,’” 102.

[21] For Rancière, dissensus is “an intersection of the ways in which we establish the criteria of knowledge… not an epistemological break but a break of epistemology as the qualifying perceptual criterion for political participation.”(Davide Panagia, “‘Partage Du Sensible’: The Distribution of the Sensible,” in Jacques Ranciere: Key Concepts, ed. Jean-Philippe Deranty (Durham: Routledge, 2014), 98, 100.

[22] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Reginald Snell (Mineola, N.Y: Dover Publications, 2004), 75.

[23] Andrew M. Goldstein, “I Survived the Zombie Formalism Apocalypse: The Hard-Won Lessons of London Dealer Rod Barton,” Artspace, February 12, 2016.

[24] In “Flipping and the Rise of Zombie Formalism” (2014), Robinson described it as “’Formalism’ because this art involves a straightforward, reductive, essentialist method of making a painting… and ‘Zombie’ because it brings back to life the discarded aesthetics of Clement Greenberg, the man who championed Jackson Pollock, Morris Louis, and Frank Stella’s ‘black paintings,’ among other things” (Walter Robinson, “Flipping and the Rise of Zombie Formalism,” Artspace, April 3, 2014). Zombie Formalism is associated with “the vogue for a certain type of painting among collectors known for their speculative investment in young artists” (Chris Wiley, “The Toxic Legacy of Zombie Formalism, Part 1: How an Unhinged Economy Spawned a New World of ‘Debt Aesthetics,’” Artnet (blog), July 26, 2018, para. 2), often process-based abstract paintings with a “shabby chic” look. 

[25] “The Appeal of the Cute Object: Desire, Domestication, and Agency,” in The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness, ed. Joshua Paul Dale et al. (New York: Routledge, 2016), 37.

[26] “Introduction,” in Mechademia 6: User Enhanced, ed. Frenchy Lunning (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xvii.

“Lately, I just love going to school!”

Thus speaks Takeya Yuki, a carefree, pink-haired girl who loves her school so much that she never wants to leave. Yuki has become a member of the School Living Club, for students who have taken residency within the school building. Every day, Yuki wakes up in an improvised classroom‑cum‑bedroom, puts on her trademark cat ear barrette and sailor school uniform (seifuku), along with a pink backpack with cute angel wings (evocative of magical girl icon Cardcaptor Sakura), and heads off seeking fun school activities. The other club members are Wakasa Yuuri, the president and onee-sama (“big sister”) figure to the girls; the athletic tomboy, Ebisuzawa Kurumi; the serious junior, Naoki Miki; the supervising teacher, Sakura Megumi; and, last but not least, the club dog Taromaru. [Figure 1] The members of the School Living Club not only attend classes but eat, play, and even sleep in the school’s precincts. “I know it sounds weird, but school is awesome,” Yuki tells us as she sprints through the corridors. “The physics room has these weird devices. The music room has beautiful instruments and intimidating portraits. In the communications room, all the school is your stage!” And adds for good measure: “We’ve got everything. We’re like our own country!”

This is the premise of Gakkōgurashi! (School‑Live!)—in Japanese, gakkō means “school” and kurashi means “life, living, livelihood, life circumstances”—a manga series written by Kaihō Norimitsu and illustrated by Chiba Sadoru.[1] [Figure 2] The series began serialization in July 2012, in the seinen magazine Manga Time Kirara Forward. In 2015, it was adapted into a 12-episode animation by the animation team Lerch, directed by Ando Masaomi.[2] The first episode of School‑Live! focuses on Yuki and Miki as they chase Taromaru around various school locations. It is an unhurried parade of overdone moé settings, clichéd slice-of-life tropes, and stale character designs. At some point, Yuki gets gently reprimanded for running in the hallways by Sakura-sensei. Yuki, who nicknames her Megu-nee (“big sister Megu”), candidly apologizes that “I didn’t notice you since you don’t really stand out much!” much to her teacher’s dismay.

The episode’s mood is cheerful and slapstick, yet the astute viewer will notice that something is amiss. Miki’s expressions sometimes feel out of place, sad and perplexed. She is also shown reading a book by Stephen King, a somewhat inappropriate appearance for the circumstances and location of your typical moé show. But it is not until the very end of the episode that the truth is exposed. When Yuki is talking cheerfully to some girls in her class, Miki calls out to her from the entryway. As Yuki turns around, the classroom, once a stereotypical school environment, transforms into a war zone. [Figure 3] The room is empty, and the windows are broken. There is shattered glass all over the floor. Blood splattered everywhere. The desks are turned. Yuki greets Miki and continues talking to herself, alone inside the classroom. Outside, the playground is filled with zombified teenagers in torn school uniforms, groaning and wandering around aimlessly, their flesh rotten. [Figure 4a, b] “You seem tense. Nervous?” says Yuki to Miki. “Not at all,” Miki answers. To which Yuki retorts, “You don’t have to be on edge just because I’m older.” The banter is interrupted when Yuki notices a shattered window that has been left open. “The window is opened…” she says, closing it. A soft breeze blows her hair, passing through the naked frame, but Yuki ignores it. Instead, she flashes a confident smile at the world outside. [Figure 5]

Thus, Gakkōgurashi! exposes the School Living Club for what it is: a farce, created to protect Yuki who suffered a mental breakdown during the Zombie Apocalypse, and of which she and the other club members are the sole survivors. The club activities are, in truth, survival missions. Even Sakura‑sensei is a figment of Yuki’s delusions, as the real Megumi Sakura died before the series started, sacrificing her life to save the students. The recurring joke in anime and manga comedies, where an adorable character is teased for their lack of presence, is subverted by the fact that the teacher has indeed been absent—dead—all along. [Figure 6]

Another tell-tale sign that Gakkōgurashi! is not your everyday moé show is the fact that a member of the Japanese visual novel company Nitroplus wrote it (Kaihō Norimitsu). Although the characters created by Nitroplus are often cute, the company specializes in stories whose tone is dark and deconstructive (e.g., Saya no Uta). In School-Live!, the derivative characters, settings, and designs are deliberately planted to fool the viewer into believing the show is too moé for its own good. [Figure 7] The existence of a School Living Club, as improbable as it is, is readily accepted by the viewers of Gakkōgurashi! as the culmination of school life being at the narrative core of much moé animanga. Not “real” school, but the school as a safe place devoid of work, violence or harassment, a utopia of idealized companionship. Indeed, variations of “school is fun!” have by now become stock phrases within the moé genre. But as the show discloses its apocalyptic scenario, the escapism of moé blurs into the escapist delusions of the main character, Yuki.

As such, the timing of Gakkōgurashi!’s release is revealing: the manga began serialization little over a year after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, followed by the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Using the Zombie Apocalypse as a metaphor for Japan’s “envirotechnical disasters,”[3] School Live! reflects on the possibility of moé in a post-disaster world. Moé, arguably the most pervasive genre/aesthetic in twenty-first-century Japanese animation, gained enormous popularity among the otaku crowd during the 2000s, but not without criticism. On the one hand, moé is accused of stultifying the anime and manga industry.[4] Unlike “noble” genres like science fiction, from which many anime classics have stemmed (Space Battleship Yamato, Ghost In The Shell, Neon Genesis Evangelion, etc.), cute girls doing cute thing are—at least, in the eyes of many critics—hardly conducive to high art.

On the other hand, moé girls are frequently interpreted as problematic fabrications of the otaku’s regressive sexual politics.[5] The criticism has intensified over the last several years, with reports and counter reports on the “death of moé” circulating the Internet. For instance, author and industry observer Akamatsu Ken has proclaimed the genre’s dismissal, while others, such as anime critic John Opplinger, suggested that it is merely evolving into “a new variety that hasn’t become entrenched enough yet to be easily and immediately recognizable.”[6] Oppliger argues that this new variety of moé is less tied to the genre’s lolicon origins and therefore less possessive and sexualized. In this context, Gakkōgurashi! offers a surprising contribution to this debate, suggesting that moé is neither dying nor changing for the best. Instead, it has become zombified.

Despite its gimmicky “moé + Zombie Apocalypse” premise, Gakkōgurashi! is a sophisticated critique of cuteness and escapism in otaku culture, and Japan at large. For instance, the members of the School Living Club disagree on how to deal with Yuki’s delusions. At one point, the club president Yuuri and Miki, the newcomer, argue after the latter refers to Yuki saying that “I hope she gets better soon.” Hearing this, Yuuri tells Miki: “As long as you’re here, will you please play along with her?” To which Miki retorts that “if we do that, she’ll never recover.” “It isn’t about whether or not she recovers,” says Yuuri, annoyed. “This is different. I’m sure you don’t understand just yet.” At face value, the argument between Yuuri and Miki concerns their different views on post-traumatic stress and mental illness in an extreme scenario. For Yuuri, Yuki’s smile keeps the group going and must be protected at any cost, even by playing along with Yuki’s dementia. On a meta-level, though, Yuuri and Miki’s argument addresses the ethics of moé itself as a genre.

Yuki is a prototypical genki girl: a hyperactive female character who runs everywhere, babbles and is generally fired up about anything and everything (the Japanese word genki means “energetic” or “enthusiastic”). [Figure 8] Yuuri, the club president, refers to Yuki’s displaced vitality as her “smile.” Yuki’s “smile” thus works as “a heightened announcement of the fact that life is there”[7] not despite, but because of reality’s horrors. In this sense, Yuki and the zombies are on a continuum with each other, representing two sides of the same coin—both are zombified, animated beyond their death, which in Yuki’s case amounts to her broken spirit. But whereas the zombies are straightforward expressions of Thanatos, i.e., the death drive, Yuki is an embodiment of life forces (Eros), of the will to live, and the affective “work of pleasure-making, fantasy-building, and game-creating.”[8] Yuki expresses the genki girl trope within the highly formulaic and repetitive parameters of moé because, as Gilles Deleuze writes, “Eros can be lived only through repetition, whereas Thanatos… is that which gives repetition to Eros, that which submits Eros to repetition.”[9] The Zombie Apocalypse in Gakkōgurashi! thus captures the status of moé as an inadequate interface in a post-disaster world, which nevertheless persists as a form of healing, even if it is more risky than beneficial.

Yuki, one might argue, is a “body of dementia,”[10] a term coined by Ōtori Hidenaga to describe a state of “bodily rampage” where “not the mind but the body is in the state of dementia.”[11] According to Ōtori, the “body of dementia” is a typically postmodern condition thoroughly observable in Japan:

For Ōtori, “something more drastic than being dysfunctional has arrived, and at least in Japan, bodies are behaving very strangely in the streets… the bodies themselves are, in a sense, in a state of dementia by lacking any circuit for self-examination.”[13] Sadly, the “body of dementia” observed by Ōtori continues to manifest today in tragedies like the Kyoto Animation arson attack in July of 2019, one of the deadliest massacres in Japan’s postwar history that killed thirty-five members of the animation studio known, among other things, for popularizing the “moé eyes” (a particularly recognizable style of big, cute eyes associated with the moé phenomenon) in beloved series like Suzumiya Haruhi (2006, 2009), Lucky Star (2007), and K-On! (2009). However, the “body of dementia” can be traced back to psychosocial phenomena like the dancing mania—also known as choreomania, dancing plague, or tarantism, as it was believed to be caused by the bite of a tarantula—a form of mass hysteria from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, in which groups of up to four hundred people danced until they collapsed or died from exhaustion.[14] [Figure 9] Yuki, like these mad dancers, is also a rampaging body whose agency has been compromised. Hence, the genki girl in Gakkōgurashi! not only serves as a mechanism for coping with trauma but encapsulates the very correlation between “life‑exuberance”[15] and the loss of subjective awareness. For instance, according to Aurel Kolnai, author of Der Ekel (“On Disgust,” 1929), this “indecent surplus of life”[16] which both Yuki and the zombies possess is fundamentally associated with the motif of putrefaction (a connection also observable in vanitas still life paintings, where food would be shown to be starting to rot and therefore have insects crawling about it).[17]

In Ugly Feelings (2007), Sianne Ngai also notes the “ambiguous interplay between agitated things and deactivated persons”[18] in old animation technologies, like Claymation. According to Ngai, the magic of animation derives from “the most basic or minimal of all affective conditions: that of being in one way or another ‘moved.’”[19] Indeed, Yuki’s “body of dementia” exposes her status as a stock character in Japanese animation, whose flatness, both literal and figurative, prevents her from making sense outside the narrative fabric of moé, even when the latter is coming apart at the seams. Yuki runs giddily through dangerous hallways. She chats with non-existent classmates and gets scolded by a teacher whose lack of presence stems, not from a demeaning joke, but being, in fact, dead. The genki girl, out of place in the Zombie Apocalypse, becomes a symbol and a symptom of Japanese cute culture and postmodernity.

Still, Yuki’s character development involves a trajectory towards “grounding.” Even amid dementia, Yuki realizes her fantasy is plagued with inconsistencies, occasionally panicking when glimpsing the truth of the world she inhabits: the anime “camera” loses focus to convey her existential vertigo, and the fantasy comes apart at the seams, revealing the veiled reality (e.g., her ordinary classmates are transformed into zombies). [Figure 10a, b] Little by little, Yuki begins to come to terms with reality, wishing to be helpful instead sheltered by the other girls. This “grounding” aligns with Miki’s belief that Yuki needs a reality check to cure her inability to distinguish reality from fantasy. Yuki’s “body of dementia” can be interpreted as a cautionary tale about the escapism of otaku culture: as Ōtori points out, “for those who overindulge in animations and computer games, reality and fantasy are indistinguishable.”[20] But Gakkōgurashi!’s relishing in the emancipatory power of Yuki’s “smile” proposes a more sophisticated take on the relationship between fantasy and reality, art and trauma. Yuki does not merely see the world differently from every other character—she modifies the anime, the medium itself, as viewers see the world through her eyes. In this sense, Gakkōgurashi!’s is not a moé show set in Zombie Apocalypse but slips in and out of the moé genre, as the viewer slips in and out of Yuki’s delusion. The School Living Club enacts dissensus, as formulated by philosopher Jacques Rancière, i.e., a critique of the unequal distribution of the sensible and knowledge-producing regimes in society.[21] In Gakkōgurashi!, the sensible is redistributed by endorsing Yuki’s “play impulse”[22] as a  rival interpretation of a seemingly univocal reality, namely, the horrifying Zombie Apocalypse. The places of the massacre become pristine schoolrooms. A life or death mission to get food supplies transmogrifies into a thrilling kimodameshi (“test of courage”) beyond the barricades blocking the hallway. And it is not that staying inside the school is the girls’ only chance at survival; it is just that school is so much fun they do not, of their own volition, want to leave! The result is a constant back and forth between moé and survival fiction, a cute Zombie Apocalypse intermingling the opposite ends of cuteness and horror, Eros and Thanatos.

There is, therefore, no easy resolution for Miki and Yuuri’s conflict. Contrary to Miki’s expectations, you cannot extract the moé out of Gakkōgurashi! without dissolving its mediatic milieu, i.e., without it ceasing to be. Nevertheless, Gakkōgurashi! does not disavowal a critical perspective on moé as aesthetics of capital. The fact that Yuki gradually “wakes up” from her delusion to face the grim and gritty reality attests that, to some degree, the moé is a false consciousness, preventing her from seeing and engaging with the world as is. At one point, Gakkōgurashi! reveals that the zombie outbreak results from a biological weapon, but one gets the impression that, more likely, this is a “Zombie Formalism apocalypse,”[23] akin to that coined by artist and critic Walter Robinson to describe the dubious rise of provisional painting and the New Casualists in the global art market.[24] [Figure 11] The formal triteness of moé, i.e., the fact that the art, characters, and settings in Gakkōgurashi! are overused, is the reason why the plot twist effectively challenges our expectations as viewers. It is a condition sine qua non for the show’s playful tautology: a moé zombie apocalypse about the zombification of moé, a walking corpse hollowed out of substance by its intensive commercial exploitation. But as argued before, the genki girl in Gakkōgurashi! also envisions a form of individual and collective emancipation from reality based on play—a central feature of cute aesthetics in general.

The School Living Club enacts a resilient and biding cuteness against the precarity and uncertainty that afflicts its members. The genki girl, as “body of dementia,” holds an affirmative intensity capable of altering what her animated world looks like, which cannot be dismissed as mere escapist fiction. If, as scholar Joshua Dale puts it, “cuteness is an appeal to others,”[25] the emancipatory potential of Yuki’s “smile” is that, like a zombie bite, it is infectious, spreading from one person to another, suturing a gap between the positive and the negative, Eros and Thanatos. Gakkōgurashi! offers an opportunity to think about the political role of cuteness, in addition to its therapeutic one, in navigating the many disasters in our world for which zombie apocalypses are well-known metaphors. Gakkōgurashi!’s provocation is that one can play with the triteness of the kawaii and animanga aesthetics in unpredictable, creative ways, envisioning, as Thomas Lamarre phrases it, “not the inertia of the commodity-object but the stirrings of a commodity-life,”[26] with all its snags and contradictions.

See in CUTENCYCLOPEDIA – CGDCT & Zombieflat.

REFERENCES in Gakkōgurashi!.

MAJOR SPOILERS!

• Gakkogurashi! (School-live!) (anime/manga) 

CONTENT NOTICE

This entry is potentially disturbing or unsuited for some readers.

Mentions or depictions of blood, death, excessive or gratuitous violence, and mental illness.