I think it is safe to say that We Are Little Zombies, the debut feature from Japanese director Makoto Nagahisa, will not be everyone’s cup of tea. It is a surreal, often noisy, and darkly comedic oddity that works, for me anyway, on several levels (admittedly, though, I have a damned high threshold for weird cinema). At its heart, We Are Little Zombies is an exploration of death and the grieving process, but its unique presentation and storytelling structure hides multifaceted layers of philosophical debate and cultural critique. It is an extremely entertaining exercise in duplicity that, while potentially tough to crack, is well worth the effort for those who dare try.
I was hooked from the very beginning. A young teenager named Hakiri (Keita Ninomiya) is orphaned after his parents are killed in a bus accident while on their way to an all-you-can-eat strawberry festival. At the overcrowded and factory-like crematorium, Hakiri meets a group of kids who have also lost their parents and are awaiting their respective cremations. Aside from having no parents, the foursome – which now includes Takemura (Mondo Okumura), Ishi (Satoshi Mizuno), and Ikuko (Sena Nakajima) – discover they have something else in common: that they are all existential nihilists who feel nothing. In essence, they are zombies.
To battle the uselessness of their existence, these GenZ Kierkegaards philosophize about meaning, search for stimuli, confront the materialism and sentimentality of their pasts and dead parents, and eventually decide to start a melancholy-infused electro-pop band called, you guessed it, Little Zombies. With near deadpan delivery, the foursome (with the help of a clueless, emo-obsessed manager and a ragtag group of homeless musicians), rise to the top of the charts and instantly gain a following among other malaise-stricken teens.
Fame, however, does nothing to break the group’s bleak outlook, and their search for truth and meaning continues with increasing surrealism. Stylistically, We Are Little Zombies directly references Nintendo and Sega games of the mid-to-late ‘80s with both its score and structure, but thematically it owes a lot of its disaffection to the 1982 Lou Adler punk rock oddity, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains. Of course, young people taking control of their own lives to the outrage and ire of adults is nothing new in cinema or in society, but rarely is it done with this much heart and wild psychedelic exuberance. Not to mention, the Little Zombies version of the 1968 classic “This Will Be Our Year” by The Zombies (of “Time of the Season” fame) is worth the price of admission alone, and exemplifies how the film wonderfully forces gloom and optimism together into an eccentric but lovable union.
James is a writer, record collector, wrestling nerd, and tabletop gamer living with his family in Asheville, North Carolina. He is a member of the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the North Carolina Film Critics Association, and contributes to The Daily Orca, Razorcake Magazine, Mountain Xpress, and Asheville Movies.