Apocalypse Hotel – Episode 1

Content considerations: Existential despair, global apocalypse

What’s it about? A virus sweeps the globe, infecting plants and making them spew toxic fumes–and all of humanity either leaves or dies. A hundred and fifty years later, a single humanoid robot remains functional in the Ginzaro Hotel, leading a team of other robots in the daily upkeep of the hotel, waiting patiently for humanity’s return. It’s gonna happen any day, right?

Five minutes into Apocalypse Hotel, I had to know: is this an original anime? The way the shots were being interspersed, the nuanced writing, and the bright visuals all seemed both familiar to me and completely unlike the Light Novel and Manga adaptations I had been seeing. I was thrilled by the stark contrast of everyday life in the hotel and the dire circumstances outside. Given the show’s resemblances to the experience of watching School-Live, I was wondering if this hotel would be a similar last bastion of humanity, the place where people would continue living normal lives as the world burns around them. 

What the show is instead is far more introspective. Yachiyo is a heroine that can best be described as Sisyphian, as her job is to manage a hotel that seems to never have guests. Her life is lonely, with her only company being the other robots in the hotel (at varying levels of sentience) and her endless work of being ready for the return of the humans–and they’re coming back, right? Right? In probably the most powerful moment of the episode, Yachiyo puts another robot on “indefinite leave,” and then puts it away with all of the other broken robots, whose fate she will one day almost certainly meet herself.

The show seems quite conscious of the existentialist thread it is pulling at, particularly through the Doorman robot, who struggles to find any meaning in his life now that he has nobody to hold doors open for. But we must imagine Sisyphus happy–he keeps up his practice, and still finds ways to try to take care of his needs even as he is slowly breaking.

To answer the question I posed at the beginning of this review, yes, this is an original Cygames Pictures production. They really have been on a roll recently with original anime, putting out banger after banger with Bravern, Akiba Maid War, Zombie Land Saga, and many others. What makes me think that the absolute desolation of this premiere, in which we have not been introduced to a good third of the characters on the poster (and Yachiyo remains alone), is the series composer, Marukoshi Shigeru. His previous original anime like Zombie Land Saga and Gymnastics Samurai have often had an off-beat but ultimately hopeful sensibility, often centering around a found or unconventional family. While much of this episode left me scratching my head about where the show would go from here, I trust Marukoshi to introduce more lovable characters like he does best to even out the cast and give us some relationships to root for. 

Yachiyo is an interesting character in her own right beyond just being a Sisyphean stand-in absurd heroine. She takes her role as a boss very seriously, probably because it is the only thing that keeps her sane as her life becomes more and more lonely. It is through her role as a boss that she understands her commitments to others, and her inability to live up to this role is what gives her an existential crisis at the end of the episode. She has been pouring water all over the Doorman Robot to keep him from breaking every day, completely unaware that he hates having water on his face. (Honestly the image of the Doorman robot with the little shampoo hat on his face was adorable. I didn’t even know shampoo hats existed before watching this show!) I wonder whether letting go of her role as boss as more characters are introduced will help her to actually connect with the people around her, and alleviate the profound loneliness that suffused this episode. I will certainly be sticking around to see it.